Moral Functioning Research Articles

In the name of God: the evolutionary origins of religious ethics and violence

Acknowledgments. Introduction: Evolution and Mind. 1. The Evolution of Morality. Setting the Task. The Moral Brain. The First Layer: Kin Selection. The Second Layer: Reciprocal Altruism. A Third Layer: Indirect Reciprocity. A Fourth Layer: Cultural Group Selection. A Fifth Layer: The Moral Emotions. Conclusion: From Moral Grammar to Moral Systems. 2. The Evolution of Moral Religions. Setting the Task. The Evolution of the Religious Mind. Conceptualizing the Almighty. The Moral Function of Gods. 3. Evolutionary Religious Ethics: Judaism. Setting the Task. Constructing Yahweh. The Ten Commandments: An Evolutionary Interpretation. Conclusion: The Evolved Law. 4. Evolutionary Religious Ethics:Christianity. Setting the Task. Constructing the Christ. Setting the Boundaries: Christian and/or Jew?. The Third Race: Christians as In-Group. Putting on Christ: Christianity s Signals ofCommitment. Loving Your Neighbor and Turning the Other Cheek. 5. Religion, Violence, and the Evolved Mind. Setting the Task. Devoted to Destruction: Sanctified Violence and Judaism. The Blood of the Lamb. A Case Study in the Evolved Psychology of Religious Violence:9/11. 6. Religion Evolving. Setting the Task. Varieties of Religious Expressions. If There Were No God . Religion, Ethics, and Violence: An Assessment. Responding to Religion, Ethics, and Violence: SomeProposals. Conclusions. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

The emotional foundations of high moral intelligence

Moral intelligence is grounded in emotion and reason. Neuroscientific and clinical research illustrate how early life co-regulation with caregivers influences emotion, cognition, and moral character. Triune ethics theory (Narvaez, 2008) integrates neuroscientific, evolutionary, and developmental findings to explain differences in moral functioning, identifying security, engagement, and imagination ethics that can be dispositionally fostered by experience during sensitive periods, but also situationally triggered. Mature moral functioning relies on the integration of emotion, intuition, and reasoning, which come together in adaptive ethical expertise. Moral expertise can be cultivated in organizations using the integrative ethical education model.

Should Empathic Development Be a Priority in Biomedical Ethics Teaching? A Critical Perspective

Biomedical ethics is an essential part of the medical curriculum because it is thought to enrich moral reflection and conduce to ethical decisionmaking and ethical behavior. In recent years, however, the received idea that competency in moral reasoning leads to moral responsibility “in the field” has been the subject of sustained attention. Today, moral education and development research widely recognize moral reasoning as being but one among at least four distinguishable dimensions of psychological moral functioning alongside moral motivation, moral character, and moral sensitivity. In a reflection of this framework, medical educators and curriculum planners repeatedly advance the idea that educators should be concerned with supporting empathy, and this, very often, as a means of improving on and broadening medical ethics education’s traditional focus on moral reasoning.

Resources for a Post-Kohlbergian Model of Moral Functioning

Resources for a Post-Kohlbergian Model of Moral Functioning

Suppression of the aggressive impulse: conceptual difficulties in anti-violence programs

School anti-violence programs are united in their radical condemnation of aggression, generally equated with violence. The programs advocate its elimination by priming children's emotional and cognitive controls. What goes unrecognized is the embeddedness of aggression in human beings, as well as its positive psychological and moral functions. In attempting to eradicate aggression, schools increase the risk of student disaffection while stifling the goods associated with it: status, power, dominance, agency, mastery, pride, social-affiliation, social-approval, loyalty, self-respect, and self-confidence. It is argued that the distribution of power and authority to students as plausible substitutes for aggression, would enable them to express aggression in a legitimate manner and simultaneously encourage their attachment to school. A vibrant anti-violence program that attracts children will find a way for caring, amiability, sympathy, and kindness to live in tandem with competition, power, assertiveness, and anger tamed by institutional constraints.

A Study about Moral Functioning of The Core Constructs of Moral Character

A Study about Moral Functioning of The Core Constructs of Moral Character

FORGIVENESS, COMMEMORATION, AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: THE ROLE OF MORAL EMOTIONS

Abstract: Forgiveness of wrongdoing in response to public apology and amends making seems, on the face of it, to leave little room for the continued commemoration of wrongdoing. This rests on a misunderstanding of forgiveness, however, and we can explain why there need be no incompatibility between them. To do this, I emphasize the role of what I call nonangry negative moral emotions in constituting memories of wrongdoing. Memories so constituted can persist after forgiveness and have important moral functions, and commemorations can elicit these emotions to preserve memories of this sort. Moreover, commemorations can be a restorative justice practice that promotes reconciliation, but only on condition that the memories they preserve are constituted by nonangry negative, not retributive, emotions.

Varieties of Moral Personality: Beyond the Banality of Heroism

Four perspectives dominate thinking about moral heroism: One contends that moral action is primarily instigated by situational pressures, another holds that moral excellence entails the full complement of virtues, the third asserts a single superintending principle, and the fourth posits different varieties of moral personality. This research addresses these competing perspectives by examining the personalities of moral heroes. Participants were 50 national awardees for moral action and 50 comparison individuals. They responded to personality inventories and a life-review interview that provided a broadband assessment of personality. Cluster analysis of the moral exemplars yielded three types: a "communal" cluster was strongly relational and generative, a "deliberative" cluster had sophisticated epistemic and moral reasoning as well as heightened self-development motivation, and an "ordinary" cluster had a more commonplace personality. These contrasting profiles imply that exemplary moral functioning can take multifarious forms and arises from different sources, reflecting divergent person x situation interactions.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value

Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value is broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter-relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter-Relations to Artistic Value.’ Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work Philosophy Compass Teaching & Learning Guide, Philosophy Compass 5/5 (2010): 426–431, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00299.x

A New Me Generation? The Increasing Self-Interest among Millennial College Students

Each new generation of college-goers presents a new set of challenges for faculty and student affairs educators, and the Millennial Generation has certainly done so since they began arriving on college campuses in 2000. One particular challenge unique to Millennials is that they are highly motivated and high-achieving, and rely on their parents and other authority figures for direction and approval, shifting their loci of control to external players. In this article, the authors summarize research that demonstrates an increase in personally-interested thinking and externality among Millennials, and the implications of these findings for moral judgment development and moral functioning.

Detaching Reasons From Aims: Fair Play and Well-Being in Soccer as a Function of Pursuing Performance-Approach Goals for Autonomous or Controlling Reasons

In two cross-sectional studies we investigated whether soccer players' well-being (Study 1) and moral functioning (Studies 1 and 2) is related to performance-approach goals and to the autonomous and controlling reasons underlying their pursuit. In support of our hypotheses, we found in Study 1 that autonomous reasons were positively associated with vitality and positive affect, whereas controlling reasons were positively related to negative affect and mostly unrelated to indicators of morality. To investigate the lack of systematic association with moral outcomes, we explored in Study 2 whether performance-approach goals or their underlying reasons would yield an indirect relation to moral outcomes through their association with players' objectifying attitude-their tendency to depersonalize their opponents. Structural equation modeling showed that controlling reasons for performance-approach goals were positively associated with an objectifying attitude, which in turn was positively associated to unfair functioning. Results are discussed within the achievement goal perspective (Elliot, 2005) and self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

SPINOZA ON CEREMONIAL OBSERVANCES AND THE MORAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION

* This paper was originally delivered as a talk at the international workshop on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, organised by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, University of Leiden, Department of Philosophy (May 20, 2008). I thank Eric Schliesser for inviting me and the other participants for their stimulating comments. Suggestions by Ursula Goldenbaum, Herman De Dijn and Stephen Nadler on an earlier version of this text helped me a lot. I am especially indebted to an anonymous referee of Bijdragen for some clarifications and improvements. 1 All references to the Tractatus Theologico Politicus and the Ethics are to the Shirley edition: Benedict de Spinoza, Complete Works, With the Translations of Samuel Shirley, Edited by Michel L. Morgan, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 2002. SPINOZA ON CEREMONIAL OBSERVANCES AND THE MORAL FUNCTION OF RELIGION*

Significant Predictors of Soccer Players’ Moral Functioning from Components of Contextual Injustice, Sensitivity to Injustice and Moral Atmosphere

This study analysed the effects of contextual injustice on the moral functioning of soccer players with two goals: (1) to identify the factors of contextual injustice, moral atmosphere and sensitivity to injustice that significantly predict moral functioning and (2) to test the hypothesis that sensitivity to injustice has an effect only in unjust contexts. Three hundred players (from 16 to 40 years old) participated in the study. The analyses indicated a negative and significant effect of contextual injustice on moral functioning. Sensitivity to injustice was, like moral atmosphere, one of the best predictors of moral functioning. Moreover, sensitivity to injustice was a significant predictor of moral functioning in both just and unjust contexts.

Illness and Meaning: A Review of Select Writings

This article explores select writings of seven authors who have examined the experience of serious illness, the meaning of it, and how individuals create or discover that meaning. These authors have been seminal thinkers in the field, and their works have influenced current thinking about illness and meaning. This article explores six major themes from select works of these authors: (a) postmodernism, culture, and illness; (b) embodied knowledge and the sick person; (c) illness narratives and their moral function; (d) key relationships for the sick person; (e) illness and death; and (f) the meaning of being ill. Apart from these, areas for future exploration are included.

COMPARATIVE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: CATEGORIZING POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES USING TWELVE ARCHETYPES

Abstract:Comparative political philosophy can be stimulated by imposing a categorization scheme on possible varieties of political philosophies. This article develops a categorization scheme using four essential features of political philosophies, resulting in twelve archetypal political philosophies. The four essential features selected are a political philosophy's views concerning human nature, the proper function of morality, the best form of society, and the highest responsibility of citizenship. The twelve archetypal political philosophies range from the communal (Rousseau), the democratic (J. S. Mill), the representative (Aristotle), the aristocratic (Plato), and the autocratic (Calvin), along with seven more archetypes: the aloof anarchy, social anarchy, contractarian, progressive, natural law, sage ruler, and tyrannical political forms. A wide variety of Western political philosophers are assigned their places within this categorization scheme to illustrate its utility and comprehensiveness.

A multi‐level model of moral functioning revisited

The model of moral functioning scaffolded in the 2008 JME Special Issue is here revisited in response to three papers criticising that volume. As guest editor of that Special Issue I have formulated the main body of this response, concerning the dynamic systems approach to moral development, the problem of moral relativism and the role of emotion in moral functioning. Five 2008 Special Issue authors contribute reflections: Darcia Narvaez, Jeremy Frimer and Lawrence Walker, Helen Haste and Ann Higgins‐d’Alessandro. The Dynamic Systems Approach proposed by Kim and Sankey is commended, with some reflections on potential problems. The challenge of Gibbs et al. is answered. And the concerns of Kristjánsson are recognised as pointing toward needed work though failing to appreciate the way the Special Issue authors frame the role of emotion in moral functioning. The outline of the multi‐level model of moral functioning offered in the Special Issue is clarified and reaffirmed in response to these three critiques.

Taking development seriously: critique of the 2008 JME Special Issue on moral functioning

This essay comments on articles comprising a Journal of Moral Education Special Issue (September, 2008, 37[3]). The issue was intended to honour the 50th anniversary of Lawrence Kohlberg’s doctoral dissertation and his subsequent impact on the field of moral development and education. The articles were characterised by the Issue editor (Don Collins Reed) as providing a ‘look forward’ from Kohlberg’s work toward a more comprehensive or integrated model of moral functioning. Prominent were culturally pluralist and biologically‐based themes, such as cultural learning; expert skill; culturally shaped and neurobiologically‐based predispositions or intuitions; and moral self‐relevance or centrality. Inadequately represented, however, was Kohlberg’s (and Piaget’s) key concept of development as the construction of a deeper or more adequate understanding not reducible to particular socialisation practices or cultural contexts. Also neglected were related cognitive‐developmental themes, along with supportive evidence. Robert Coles’ account of a sudden rescue is used as a heuristic to depict Piaget’s/Kohlberg’s approach to the development of moral functioning. We conclude that, insofar as the Special Issue does not take development seriously, it moves us not forward but, instead, back to the problems of moral relativism and moral paralysis that Kohlberg sought to redress from the start of his work more than 50 years ago.

Putting emotion into the self: a response to the 2008 Journal of Moral Education Special Issue on moral functioning

This paper takes as its starting point the Journal of Moral Education Special Issue (September, 2008, 37[3]) ‘Towards an integrated model of moral reasoning’. Although explicitly post‐Kohlbergian, the authors in this Special Issue do not, I argue, depart far enough from Kohlberg’s impoverished notion of the role of the affective in moral life—or when they do so depart, they incorporate emotions as mere intuitive thrusts in an essentially polarised two‐system view of the moral self. Prior to that complaint, I sketch an account of two contrasting self‐paradigms: a ‘dominant’ cognitive, anti‐realist (constructivist) paradigm and an ‘alternative’ realist and emotion‐based one. I explore the implications of the latter paradigm, which I endorse, for our understanding of the ‘emotional self’: a self imbued with and constituted by (potentially rationally grounded) emotions. I finally contrast that understanding with the one permeating the Special Issue and elicit some educational implications of the alternative paradigm.

Towards a Dynamic Systems Approach to moral development and moral education: a response to the JME Special Issue, September 2008

Is ‘development’ a concept that properly belongs to mind and morality and, if it does, what account can we give of moral development now that Piagetian and Kohlbergian models are increasingly being abandoned in developmental psychology? In addressing this central issue, it is hoped that the paper will contribute to the quest for a new integrated model of moral functioning, called for in the September 2008 Special Issue of the Journal of Moral Education (37[3]). Our paper argues that the notion of moral development is fully justified, though it does not occur via invariant stages. Rather, each child is an emergent self‐organising organism in which development is highly variable, dynamic and often non‐linear. By viewing each child as a self‐organising being and adopting the notion that moral development is dynamic and emergent from the predilection to value, the paper points towards a new account of moral development that opens up new avenues for educational research and moral education in schools.

Are psychopaths morally sensitive?

Philosophical and psychological opinion is divided over whether moral sensitivity, understood as the ability to pick out a situation's morally salient features, necessarily involves emotional engagement. This paper seeks to offer insight into this question. It reasons that if moral sensitivity does draw significantly on affective capacities of response, then moral insensitivity should be characteristic of psychopathy, a diagnostic category associated with pathologically low affectivity. The paper considers three bodies of empirical evidence on the moral functioning of psychopaths: (1) psychopathy and the moral/conventional distinction; (2) psychopathy and social perspective‐taking competency; and (3) psychopathy and social information processing models of aggressive behaviour. On the basis of this evidence, the conclusion is reached that psychopaths are morally sensitive in the operative sense. Thus, conceptions of moral perception that include affect in their definitions are questionable, as are educational interventions that claim to develop an affective aspect of moral functioning by improving skills in situational moral perception.