Reason and intuition in Aristotle's moral psychology: why he was not a two-system dualist

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.

Moral psychology once regarded ethics of care as a promising theory. However, there is evidence to suggest that nowadays moral psychology completely ignores ethics of care’s various insights. Moreover, ethics of care’s core concepts – compassion, dependence, and the importance of early relations to moral development– are no longer considered to be relevant to the development of new theories in the field. In this paper, I will firstly discuss some of the reasons which, over recent years, have contributed to the marginalization of the role of ethics of care in moral psychology. Next, I will show that ethics of care’s most promising idea centered on the care given to an infant and the importance of that care to the development of moral thinking. In this context, I will be describing the implications of John Bowlby’s attachment theories, infant research, findings in moral psychology and neuroscience. I will argue that ethics of care needs to be radically re-thought and replaced by a psychology of care, an attachment approach to moral judgment, which would establish the centrality of the caregiver’s role in moral development. The philosophical implications of this approach to the understanding of the “rationalists” and “intuitionists” debate about the true nature of moral judgment is also discussed.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dissociation, cognitive conflict and nonlinear patterns of heart rate dynamics in patients with unipolar depression

According to Verweij, the model of Haidt makes an important case for more attention to the ‘e-word’, emotions, in military ethics education. Haidt is an important pioneer within moral psychology of the dual-process model for understanding moral judgment. This chapter discusses how dual-process models indeed provides tools for embracing the ‘e-word’ in ethics education in practical ways, however, only when giving more room to the role of reasoning. This can be done by introducing a critically modified perspective of Musschenga. By addressing intuitions into the learning process in a structured way, by making clear that people could grow from beginners to experts by strengthening their intuitions through education, it is possible to entrench both emotions and reasoning in military ethics education.

How (and where) does moral judgment work?

This volume presents a variety of perspectives from within and outside moral psychology. Recently there has been an explosion of research in moral psychology, but it is one of the subfields most in need of bridge-building, both within and across areas. Interests in moral phenomena have spawned several separate lines of research that appear to address similar concerns from a variety of perspectives. The contributions to this volume examine key theoretical and empirical issues these perspectives share that connect these issues with the broader base of theory and research in social and cognitive psychology. The first two chapters discuss the role of mental representation in moral judgment and reasoning. Sloman, Fernbach, and Ewing argue that causal models are the canonical representational medium underlying moral reasoning, and Mikhail offers an account that makes use of linguistic structures and implicates legal concepts. Bilz and Nadler follow with a discussion of the ways in which laws, which are typically construed in terms of affecting behavior, exert an influence on moral attitudes, cognition, and emotions. Baron and Ritov follow with a discussion of how people's moral cognition is often driven by law-like rules that forbid actions and suggest that value-driven judgment is relatively less concerned by the consequences of those actions than some normative standards would prescribe. Iliev et al. argue that moral cognition makes use of both rules and consequences, and review a number of laboratory studies that suggest that values influence what captures our attention, and that attention is a powerful determinant of judgment and preference. Ginges follows with a discussion of how these value-related processes influence cognition and behavior outside the laboratory, in high-stakes, real-world conflicts. Two subsequent chapters discuss further building blocks of moral cognition. Lapsley and Narvaez discuss the development of moral characters in children, and Reyna and Casillas offer a memory-based account of moral reasoning, backed up by developmental evidence. Their theoretical framework is also very relevant to the phenomena discussed in the Sloman et al., Baron and Ritov, and Iliev et al. chapters. The final three chapters are centrally focused on the interplay of hot and cold cognition. They examine the relationship between recent empirical findings in moral psychology and accounts that rely on concepts and distinctions borrowed from normative ethics and decision theory. Connolly and Hardman focus on bridge-building between contemporary discussions in the judgment and decision making and moral judgment literatures, offering several useful methodological and theoretical critiques. Ditto, Pizarro, and Tannenbaum argue that some forms of moral judgment that appear objective and absolute on the surface are, at bottom, more about motivated reasoning in service of some desired conclusion. Finally, Bauman and Skitka argue that moral relevance is in the eye of the perceiver and emphasize an empirical approach to identifying whether people perceive a given judgment as moral or non-moral. They describe a number of behavioral implications of people's reported perception that a judgment or choice is a moral one, and in doing so, they suggest that the way in which researchers carve out the moral domain a priori might be dubious.

Nietzsches Philosophie des Unbewussten, the third volume in De Gruyter's recently launched Nietzsche Heute/Nietzsche Today series, collects more than twenty articles ostensibly devoted to the theme of the unconscious in Nietzsche's philosophy. However, it is not always easy to determine what each article contributes to the volume topic. This may reflect the fact that the chapters derive from the 2011 conference of the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft, which aimed to provide a multifaceted treatment of whatever falls under the label unconscious in Nietzsche's philosophy. Transferred into book form, this liberal attitude creates a rather disorienting juxtaposition of themes and approaches, rather than a lively variety of perspectives on a common topic—or, at least, that is this reader's impression. Since the articles differ considerably in quality, length, and pertinence to the volume topic, I shall focus on those that strike me as addressing important aspects of, and offering interesting insights into, Nietzsche's “philosophy of the unconscious.”Before proceeding to this task, however, there is a further, perhaps more serious shortcoming of Nietzsches Philosophie des Unbewussten that I should point out. For the book is likely to disappoint the expectation, arguably raised by the title of the series as well as by some remarks to be found in the editors' introduction, that some of the contributions will engage with Nietzsche's view of the unconscious from contemporary perspectives. The editors, for instance, claim that, “given the contemporary boom in the explanatory models of cognitive psychology, Nietzsche's philosophy of the unconscious becomes … relevant, since it has the potential to act as a critical corrective to a narrow-minded naturalism” (2; all translations are my own). This is a controversial claim, and opens up several important questions. How is Nietzsche's naturalism different from, or even superior to, that of today's cognitive psychology? How do his views about the unconscious grounds of the mind, agency, and the self compare with contemporary models? And how do they fare in light of recent findings in neuroscience, moral psychology, cognitive anthropology, and so on? Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, the chapters included in the volume do not address such questions.I now turn to the chapters that I found most pertinent and insightful. Some articles explore the relation between Nietzsche's view of the unconscious and the psychoanalytic tradition. Günter Gödde's contribution is particularly significant in this regard, as it clearly articulates the idea that Nietzsche belongs to what Gödde calls the “instinctual-irrational” tradition of the unconscious inaugurated by Schopenhauer and culminating in Freud's theory. Gödde substantiates this idea by showing that all three figures characterize the unconscious with similar sets of metaphors and by pointing out strong analogies between the roles the notion plays in Nietzsche's and in Freud's theories. However, Gödde also goes further by arguing that Nietzsche's ideas bear no substantial relation to two other important traditions of the unconscious, the “romantic-vital” and the “cognitive.” At least regarding the latter tradition, which goes back to Leibniz's thesis that there are representations in our mind that remain unconscious, this claim is unpersuasive. For in two of the most important published passages in which he deals with consciousness, aphorisms 354 and 357 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche explicitly endorses Leibniz's thesis. He was also familiar with, and seems to have accepted, the idea that some mental states, such as perceptions, involve the processing of unconscious representations. Gödde's case therefore seems only partially convincing.In his chapter, Martin Liebscher persuasively argues that Nietzsche's first engagement with the notion of the unconscious is largely passive, and that his genuine philosophical elaboration of it starts only with his so-called “middle” period. Here, Liebscher defends two claims. First, he argues that, by abandoning the kind of Schopenhauerian monism that inspired his early work, Nietzsche also abandons his previous conception of the unconscious as a “collective unity” (103). Second, Liebscher maintains that “with Nietzsche's theory of the will to power the difference between conscious and unconscious dissolves” (103). This latter claim strikes me as quite implausible. At least as a psychological notion, the will to power figures in a theory that aims at explaining how our conscious actions ultimately result from the unconscious interactions between our drives. As such, it seems to require, rather than to undermine, the distinction between conscious and unconscious.Rogério Lopes's chapter investigates the extent to which Nietzsche's theory of the drives can be classified in the instinctual-irrational tradition, as argued by Gödde. Lopes perceptively questions Gödde's reading by pointing out important differences between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Whereas Schopenhauer models his notion of the will on that of desire, Nietzsche's theory of the drives is based on the “realistically conceived processes of political reflection and agency” (155). More specifically, as Nietzsche takes intentionality to be the essential mark of agency, he does not reduce the will to a matter of blind volitions, as Schopenhauer does. Rather, the “political drive model” he puts forward can be seen as offering a minimal conception of intentionality that has the merit of both avoiding the homunculus fallacy and articulating a non-teleologically informed view of rationality (155). Thus, Lopes's intriguing proposal might be called a weak normative reading of Nietzsche's theory of the drives, and constitutes an interesting alternative to the more demanding normative interpretation recently defended by Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick in their The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).Henry Kerger's article examines Nietzsche's answer to the question of how the conscious mind may fit into the physical world. The idea that Kerger focuses on is that what philosophers now call phenomenal states cannot play any causal role in the physical world. Nietzsche makes this claim in an unpublished note of 1883, and in another note of the same period he writes that it is impossible “to derive sensation from non-sentient substance” (KSA 10, p. 649; quoted on 223). Nietzsche thus seems to postulate two independent realms, that of phenomenal states and that of physical facts. Although this raises a crucial issue and Kerger tries to clarify the relation between the two realms in terms of “psychophysical parallelism” (216–17), his proposed reading is confused. For instance, at one point he seems to ascribe to Nietzsche the claim that conscious states are “mere concomitant phenomena” (218), but a few pages later, he rejects an epiphenomenalist reading by arguing that mental states “are not concomitant phenomena in the sense of merely reflecting unconscious physical processes and being causally determined by them” (221).Other chapters in the book focus on aphorism 354 of The Gay Science, the most elaborate treatment of consciousness found in Nietzsche's published work. There, he famously argues that consciousness emerged as a side effect of socialization and, in particular, of increasingly sophisticated linguistic intercourse among the members of human communities. Sören Reuter speculates that the aphorism is a “critical reminiscence” (263) of the discussions Nietzsche had in the winter of 1883–84 with the young physiologist Josef Paneth, also known for his friendship with Freud. However, this claim seems to be undermined by Reuter's own remarks about Nietzsche's unreceptive attitude towards Paneth, whom he mistakenly saw more as a mediocre devotee than as a peer in philosophicis. However that may be, Reuter reflects on some interesting aspects of Paneth's view of consciousness which help to illustrate the historical context of Nietzsche's own position—including Paneth's reaction to Lange's Gedankenexperiment, which anticipate contemporary antireductionist arguments. Reuter also makes some interesting observations about how to interpret Nietzsche's statement that consciousness is superfluous. In particular, he claims that GS 354 deals with two different notions of consciousness, a “primary, psycho-physiological” notion and a “secondary, broadly sociological-semiotic” one (271; here I read primär as an adjective, rather than an adverb—this appears to be one of the numerous typographical errors in the book), and that the superfluousness claim should be restricted to the second notion. However, Nietzsche seems to think that the kind of physiologically realized cognitive processes that Reuter's first notion covers are, in fact, not conscious at all. Therefore, although it is true that Nietzsche's superfluousness claim does not apply to those processes, this appears to be not because they are conscious in a different sense, but rather because they do not involve any consciousness at all.In their articles, Jakob Dellinger and Axel Pichler approach this aphorism of The Gay Science from a quite different angle, taking it to exemplify the way in which the peculiar stylistic and argumentative strategies embodied by Nietzsche's (published) texts convey, so to speak, meta-interpretative clues about the epistemic status of his own claims. On the one hand, Dellinger stresses the self-referential character of the aphorism by noting that “[a]s long as the text makes the superfluousness of one's becoming conscious become conscious, it turns out to be an extreme case of that [consciousness'] ‘morbidness’” (240). On the other hand, Pichler argues that what GS 354 supplies is not a theory, but rather a “critical-heuristic narrative” (190). However, the reasoning underlying these conclusions seems questionable to me. To focus on Pichler's case, his argument assumes a restricted notion of deductively formulated theory (see 191) which does not seem very appropriate, as it would fail to apply to a good deal of plainly expounded philosophical views as well. In contrast, Nietzsche's narratives are described as hypotheses primarily intended as challenges to traditional ideas and making no “claim to definitiveness” (194–95). However, no theory worthy of the name makes such a claim.Nietzsche's take on language in its relation to the conscious-unconscious distinction is also the topic of William Mattioli's chapter. Specifically, Mattioli focuses on Nietzsche's view of language as grounded in a “linguistic-cognitive unconscious” (177) and maintains that Nietzsche shifts from an early imagistic conception of language to a later syntactical one. Mattioli proceeds to argue that this linguistic unconscious is grounded in the instinctual unconscious constituted by the physiological processes occurring in our organism. According to Mattioli, an important difference between these two kinds of unconscious is their accessibility. Whereas we lack any kind of first-person access to the physiological states and events constituting our instinctual unconscious, we can access the unconsciously implemented syntactical structures that constrain our (linguistic) thought (see 180). Here, I think, two problems emerge. The first is related to Mattioli's use of the notion of transcendental—which, although it appears in the title of the article, occurs only twice in the text. In its first occurrence, the term qualifies the first-person access we are supposed to have (only) to the linguistic unconscious (180). However, later in the chapter Mattioli claims that both the linguistic and the instinctual unconscious should be seen as transcendental, as they contribute to shape any experience we may have of the world (see 181). This suggests some tension in Mattioli's understanding of the notion. The second, more serious problem regards the idea that we can have first-personal access—through some sort of transcendental route—to the “deep grammar” of our language (178). Given Nietzsche's rejection of a priori knowledge, I doubt that he ever held this view. More importantly, contemporary linguistics clearly suggests that it is mistaken. This is a particular case where engagement with recent developments in the relevant field would have proved beneficial to the discussion and assessment of Nietzsche's position.There is more to the volume than the chapters on which I have focused. Useful information about the historical background of Nietzsche's views of the unconscious is supplied by Jean-Claude Wolf, Martine Prange, Carlotta Santini, and Anthony Jensen. Also, some authors' remarks on topics only loosely related to the unconscious are nonetheless intriguing, as in the case of Enrico Müller's criticism of Nietzsche's unperceptive understanding of Euripides's characters and Manos Perrakis's acute outline of his conception of shame. As a whole, however, the book suffers from the shortcomings I noted at the outset.

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.