From Character Trouble to Role Solutions: A Way Forward in Contemporary Moral Psychology

Contemporary moral psychology has been enormously enriched by recent theoretical developments and empirical findings in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and social psychology and psychopathology. Yet despite the fact that some theorists have developed specifically “social heuristic” (Gigerenzer, 2008) and “social intuitionist” (Haidt, 2007) theories of moral judgment and behavior, and despite regular appeals to the findings of experimental social psychology, contemporary moral psychology has largely neglected the social dimensions of moral judgment and behavior. I provide a brief sketch of these dimensions, and consider the implications for contemporary theory and research in moral psychology.

Contemporary moral psychology has been dominated by two broad traditions, one usually associated with Aristotle, the other with Kant. The broadly Aristotelian approach emphasizes the role of childhood upbringing in the development of good moral character, and the role of such character in ethical behavior. The broadly Kantian approach emphasizes the role of freely chosen conscious moral principles in ethical behavior. We review a growing body of experimental evidence that suggests that both of these approaches are predicated on an implausible view of human psychology. This evidence suggests that both childhood upbringing and conscious moral principles have extraordinarily little impact on people's moral behavior. This paper argues that moral psychology needs to take seriously a third approach, derived from Nietzsche. This approach emphasizes the role of heritable psychological and physiological traits in explaining behavior. In particular, it claims that differences in the degree to which different individuals behave morally can often be traced back to heritable differences between those individuals. We show that this third approach enjoys considerable empirical support - indeed that it is far better supported by the empirical data than are either the Aristotelian or Kantian traditions in moral psychology.

This paper is about the interplay between intuition and reason in Aristotle’s moral psychology. After discussing briefly some other uses of ‘intuition’ in Aristotle’s texts, I look closely at (a) Aristotle’s notion of virtue and emotion (Section 2); (b) affinities, or lack thereof, between Aristotle’s view and the Two-System (dual-process) model of moral judgement that has made headlines in contemporary moral psychology (Section 3); and some complications of the Aristotelian picture related to the specifics of moral functioning at different developmental levels (Section 4). The lesson drawn is that, despite recent attempts to co-opt Aristotle to the Two-System camp, he was, for all intents and purposes, a One-System theorist with respect to the relationship between intuitive emotion and reason. In that sense, his theories are in line with recent findings in neuroscience which show how emotion stimulates reflection rather than directly driving action. Even the motivational make-up of the ‘incontinent’ does not (as might perhaps be urged) provide a persuasive counter-example to a One-System interpretation of Aristotle.

This chapter is about issues in ethics and moral psychology that have been little explored by contemporary philosophers, ones that concern the advantages and disadvantages of two different kinds of empathy. Roughly, first type is what is sometimes called “other-focused” empathy, in which one reconstructs the thoughts and feelings that someone else has or would have. The second type, “self-focused” empathy, is the sort of emotional attitude someone adopts when she imagines how she would think or feel were she in the other person’s place. Both are variants of empathy, for both have to do with having thoughts and feelings that are more apt, in the relevant senses, for someone else’s circumstances than one’s own. But they differ with respect to how much one makes substantial reference to oneself in order to elicit those thoughts and feelings. In cases of self-focused empathy, we imagine ourselves facing predicaments relevantly similar to those of the person with whom we sympathize, and we achieve our empathetic response by doing things like recalling equivalent experiences or noting similar interests and desires that may bear on the situation. A little reflection on this distinction shows that it can in fact have profound implications for care, compassion, love, human motivation, and the sense of oneness or unity with others that matters so much for ethics and the well-rounded human life, but there is not yet a body of literature in contemporary moral psychology or western philosophy that really wrestles with these implications. Some influential philosophers and psychologists have taken note of the distinction, but none have engaged the issues as thoroughly as did Zhu Xi and his students in twelfth century, largely in a series of commentaries and conversations that have yet to be translated into Western languages.

In contemporary moral psychology, an often-heard claim is that knowing how we make moral judgments can help us make better moral judgments. Discussions about moral development and improvement are often framed in terms of the question of which mental processes have a better chance of leading to good moral judgments. However, few studies elaborate on the question of what makes a moral judgment a good moral judgment. This article examines what is needed to answer questions of moral improvement and development. It distinguishes 3 types of claims that are at stake: descriptive claims, metaethical claims, and normative claims. To find out what makes certain moral judgments better than others, one needs to have insight in the psychological processes and capacities underlying moral judgment formation. However, one also needs to address the question of what makes a moral judgment justified, and this in turn requires a view on the nature of moral goodness and on the question of what makes a judgment moral at all. The author discusses possible ways in which philosophical theories in the areas of metaethics and normative ethics can contribute to the answering of such questions. Also, she provides concrete suggestions for doing interdisciplinary research that is able to address those questions in moral psychology that have both normative and descriptive aspects.

The years since Kohlberg's death have marked a pivotal stage in moral psychology. The field is addressing a number of critical questions and pursuing new themes and approaches as it continues to (re)define itself in the course of its own development. This paper presents a brief overview of some of these emerging themes within the context of the traditional cognitive–developmental approach to moral socialization. In particular, it highlights changing conceptions of the moral person and raises questions about the implications of these changes for the role of reason in contemporary moral psychology.

This Element provides an overview of some of the central issues in contemporary moral psychology. It explores what moral psychology is, whether we are always motivated by self-interest, what good character looks like and whether anyone has it, whether moral judgments always motivate us to act, whether what motivates action is always a desire of some kind, and what the role is of reasoning and deliberation in moral judgment and action. This Element is aimed at a general audience including undergraduate students without an extensive background in philosophy.

Jon Haidt, a leading figure in contemporary moral psychology, advocates a participation-centric view of religion, according to which participation in religious communal activity is significantly more important than belief in explaining religious behaviour and commitment. He describes the participation-centric view as ‘Straight out of Durkheim’. I argue that this is a misreading of Durkheim, who held that religious behaviour and commitment are the joint products of belief and participation, with neither belief nor participation being considered more important than the other. I further argue that recent evidence from the cognitive science of religion provides support for Durkheim’s balanced account of religion and counts strongly against Haidt’s participation-centric view of religion. I suggest that Haidt’s adherence to the participation-centric view of religion is better explained by his desire to accept an account of religion that is consistent with his social intuitionist moral psychology than by his desire to accept an account of religion that accords with available scientific evidence about religion.

Sartre and Contemporary Moral Psychology

The aim of this essay is to introduce scholars to recent discussions of early Confucian ethics that intersect with contemporary moral psychology. Given the early Confucian tradition's intense focus on the cultivation of virtue, there are a number of ways in which early Confucian thinkers – as represented in the texts of the Analects , the Mencius , and the Xunzi – fruitfully engaged in a range of topics that are closely connected to live issues in moral psychology. Not only did they anticipate some contemporary debates (e.g. moral modularity, situationism) but explored them from a distinctively Confucian normative worldview, attending especially to the role of the family and ritual practice. This essay seeks to demonstrate that early Confucianism, by integrating a normative vision with empirically grounded observations of human behavior, offers resources for constructively exploring a number of ongoing questions in moral psychology.

The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment and Aquinas on Moral Expertise Stephen Napier CONTEMPORARY MORAL psychology is discovering some unflattering aspects of our moral intuitions. Quite simply, they are unreliable, or, at least, we have every reason to think that our intuitions are not attuned to morally relevant features of our environment. Because moral intuitions are the starting point for a person's moral judgments and reasoning, faulty intuitions can affect someone's entire system of moral beliefs. What is more, the agent whose beliefs result from these faulty intuitions would not know otherwise. As E. F. Schumacher reminded us,1 just as by the eye one can see everything except the eye through which one sees, so the moral eye can see everything except the eye through which it sees. The same is true for whole systems of moral beliefs according to which everything looks okay "from the inside" or from the perspective of the agent, but, viewed sideways on, a moral belief system may be radically disordered. This paper attempts to put contemporary cognitive science of moral judgment into conversation with Aquinas's moral epistemology. Aquinas has provided us with a cognitive therapy for our moral intuitions, one that stands as a viable remedy for the problem of faulty intuitions. My goal here is to explain why and how his moral epistemology addresses the problem of faulty intuitions. A more ambitious goal would be to argue that his [End Page 31] solution is the best solution to our epistemic predicament. Though in fact I think this is the case, I cannot argue for it here. The first section aims to highlight the problem contemporary moral psychology is discovering about our moral intuitions. The second section outlines and explains Aquinas's solution to this problem. I explain this in two stages. First, I show that Aquinas's solution to the problem of faulty intuitions is only partly the acquisition of the requisite virtues. Full rehabilitation of our moral intellects requires realizing the gifts of the Holy Spirit—in particular, understanding, knowledge, wisdom, and counsel. In the second stage I explain why the virtues and gifts are solutions to our problem. To understand why they are necessary we must understand how they operate on our moral intellects. Here I advert to recent work done on other areas of expertise with an eye toward finding family resemblances between expertise in chess and other domains, and moral expertise. We can appreciate better why the virtues and gifts are necessary if we have some grasp of how they are supposed to work, and we can see this on analogy with other forms of expertise. I. The Problem The following nomenclature will provide the framework for the remainder of our discussion. The term "intuition" in philosophy has a rather diverse meaning. Following Elijah Chudnoff2 and William Tolhurst,3 I understand intuition to mean something like an intellectual seeming analogous to a perceptual seeming. To use Aquinas's terminology, an intuition is something like an apprehension according to which "the intellect merely has a likeness of a thing existing outside the soul, as a sense has a likeness when it receives the species of a sensible thing. But when the intellect begins to judge about the thing it has apprehended, then its judgment is something proper [End Page 32] to itself."4 An intuition may be taken as an apprehension of something qua kind or species. Intuitions are intentional states in that they are about the world—"world" understood to include the perceptual environment, mathematical world, or the world of values and goods. They have a mind-to-world direction of fit, which means that they are representations of how the world actually is, or appears to be. But intuitions, as understood here, are not beliefs. One can have an intuition—a seeming—that, for example, the Muller-Lyer Illusion indicates two lines of different lengths. Click for larger view View full resolution Upon being informed that this is an illusion and/or measuring the lines, any subsequent viewing of the Muller-Lyer lines will involve a seeming that they are different lengths, but one would not believe them to be different lengths...

Eastern Orthodox accounts of acedia are often neglected in Catholic and Protestant circles, yet offer a range of insights for contemporary virtue ethics and moral psychology. Acedia is a complex concept with shades of apathy, hate, and desire that poses grave problems for the moral life and human wellbeing. This is because acedia disorders reasoning, desiring, willing, and acting, and causes various harms to relationships. Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian discuss acedia in the context of a virtue ethic ordered to human flourishing that includes practices to combat vices and build character. The result is an Orthodox conception of virtue and moral psychology that rewards ecumenical attention.

The aim of this article is to pinpoint some of the features that do—or should—make Aristotelianism attractive to current moral educators. At the same time, it also identifies theoretical and practical shortcomings that contemporary Aristotelians have been overly cavalier about. Section II presents a brisk tour of ten of the ‘pros’: features that are attractive because they accommodate certain powerful and prevailing assumptions in current moral philosophy and moral psychology—applying them to moral education. Section III explores five versions of the view that Aristotle's position is somehow anachronistic and out-dated. As none of those bears scrutiny, Section IV addresses ten features of Aristotelianism that do not seem to sit well with contemporary moral philosophy and psychology: the genuine ‘cons’ of Aristotelianism. It is subsequently argued that if we want to avoid acquiring Aristotelianism on the cheap, those less attractive features need to be engaged head-on: reinterpreted, revised or simply rejected.

Innocent intentions: A correlation between forgiveness for accidental harm and neural activity

Despite widespread pedagogical efforts to modify discrete behaviors in developing physicians, the professionalism movement has generally shied away from essential questions such as what virtues characterize the good physician, and how are those virtues formed? Although there is widespread adoption of medical ethics curricula, there is still no consensus about the primary goals of ethics education. Two prevailing perspectives dominate the literature, constituting what is sometimes referred to as the "virtue/skill dichotomy". The first perspective argues that teaching ethics is a means of providing physicians with a skill set for analyzing and resolving ethical dilemmas. The second perspective suggests that teaching ethics is a means of creating virtuous physicians. The authors argue that this debate about medical ethics education mirrors the Rationalist-Intuitionist debate in contemporary moral psychology. In the following essay, the authors sketch the relevance of the Rationalist-Intuitionist debate to medical ethics and professionalism. They then outline a moral intuitionist model of virtuous caring that derives from but also extends the "social intuitionist model" of moral action and virtue. This moral intuitionist model suggests several practical implications specifically for medical character education but also for health science education in general. This approach proposes that character development is best accomplished by tuning-up (activating) moral intuitions, amplifying (intensifying) moral emotions related to intuitions, and strengthening (expanding) intuition-expressive, emotion-related moral virtues, more than by "learning" explicit ethical rules or principles.