Moral psychology and the problem of moral criteria

Abstract

This article is intended as an initial investigation into the foundations of moral psychology. I primarily examine a recent work in moral education, Daniel Lapsley’s and Darcia Narvaez’s ‘Character education’, whose authors seem to assume at points that criteria for discerning moral actions and moral traits can be derived apart from ethics or moral philosophy. This assumption, which appears to stem from misconceptions about both the virtues traditionally understood and the non-empirical nature of moral-philosophical theorising, is problematic: (1) it courts moral relativism, which would preclude arguing for the superiority of any model of moral education, (2) deriving or validating a morality through empirical methods involves a self-undermining stance about the nature of empirical justification and (3) empirical criteria used to delineate morality are unavoidably arbitrary. After examining similarly problematic works by David Wong and Lawrence Kohlberg, I conclude that moral psychologists must wrestle with the problem of moral criteria through substantive engagement with moral philosophy.