The Creativity of Everyday Moral Reasoning: Empathy, Disgust, and Moral Persuasion

Abstract

At first glance, morality has nothing in common with creativity. It has long been clear to many philosophers that moral judgment (at least the right kind of moral judgment) is achieved through the careful and consistent application of moral principles. This approach is grounded in a school of thought that has long dominated the study of ethics – one that sees reason as the only proper foundation for moral judgment. In the 20th century, this tradition deeply influenced the study of moral judgment within psychology. The most influential theories of moral development in children, for instance, saw the development of moral judgment as being largely contingent upon the development of cognitive skills – as the quality of reasoning improves, so does the quality of moral judgment. If one holds an exclusively reason-based view of moral judgment, then creativity applies to moral judgment as much as it does to simple arithmetic – not at all. This is because creativity is not rule based, but rule breaking. Creativity is about flexibility and innovation. Creative thinking demonstrates fluency, flexibility, and originality (Torrance, 1959). It is a type of problem solving characterized by its use of novel solutions (Newell, Simon, & Shaw, 1958). If moral reasoning entails the strict application of rules, creativity has nothing to do with it. So why then would a volume devoted to creativity and reasoning include a contribution on moral reasoning? The answer is plain – mounting evidence suggests that an exclusively reason-based view of moral judgment is wrong as a psychological theory. Not because people do not reason at all when they make moral judgments (they most likely reason a great deal; Pizarro & Bloom, 2003), but because other processes are at work as well. There is evidence that everyday moral judgment is a much less rigid, more emotional, and more flexible process than previously described (for reviews, see Haidt, 2001; Pizarro, 2000). As such, there is much more room for creativity in everyday moral judgment than most psychological theories of morality have assumed.