Moral Psychology and the Unity of Morality

Utilitas ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES G. QUIGLEY
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Evolutionary Account ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Force

Jonathan Haidt's research on moral cognition has revealed that political liberals moralize mostly in terms of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives moralize in terms of those plus loyalty to Ingroup, respect for Authority, and Purity (or IAP). Some have concluded that the norms of morality encompass a wide variety of subject matters with no deep unity. To the contrary, I argue that the conservative position is partially debunked by its own lights. IAP norms’ moral relevance depends on their tendency to promote welfare (especially to prevent harm). I argue that all moral agents, including conservatives, are committed to that claim at least implicitly. I then argue that an evolutionary account of moral cognition partially debunks the view that welfare-irrelevant IAP norms have moral force. Haidt's own normative commitments are harmonized by this view: IAP norms are more important than liberals often realize, yet morality is at bottom all about promoting welfare.

Moral Psychology And Artificial Agents (Part 1): Ontologically Categorizing Bio-Cultural Humans

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laakasuo ◽  
Anton Berg ◽  
Jukka Sundvall ◽  
Marianna Drosinou ◽  
Volo Herzon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
Ontological Categories

In this chapter, we will provide theoretical background of discussion on issues related to AIs. Some of the main topics, theories and frameworks are mind perception and moral cognition, moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, trans-humanism and ontological categories shaped by evolution.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista K. Thomason
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
Moral Maturity ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The People ◽  
Positive Feelings ◽  
Negative Feelings

The conclusion summarizes the main aims of the book. Even though shame can be a painful and damaging emotion, we would still not be better off without it. A continued liability to shame shows that we accept that we are not always the people we think we are, but accepting this fact is a sign of moral maturity. Additionally, this conclusion raises questions about moral philosophy’s commitment to positive moral psychology. Although some philosophers have defended negative emotions, the field as a whole still treats positive feelings as better and more desirable than negative feelings. But it is reasonable to ask whether moral agents should try to be “emotional saints.”

Moral psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Slote
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Evaluation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Psychological Issues ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Moral Requirements ◽  
Wrong Action

Moral psychology as a discipline is centrally concerned with psychological issues that arise in connection with the moral evaluation of actions. It deals with the psychological presuppositions of valid morality, that is, with assumptions it seems necessary for us to make in order for there to be such a thing as objective or binding moral requirements: for example, if we lack free will or are all incapable of unselfishness, then it is not clear how morality can really apply to human beings. Moral psychology also deals with what one might call the psychological accompaniments of actual right, or wrong, action, for example, with questions about the nature and possibility of moral weakness or self-deception, and with questions about the kinds of motives that ought to motivate moral agents. Moreover, in the approach to ethics known as ‘virtue ethics’ questions about right and wrong action merge with questions about the motives, dispositions, and abilities of moral agents, and moral psychology plays a more central role than it does in other forms of ethical theory.

scholarly journals Précis of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua May
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Commonsense Morality

Abstract Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind argues that a careful examination of the scientific literature reveals a foundational role for reasoning in moral thought and action. Grounding moral psychology in reason then paves the way for a defense of moral knowledge and virtue against a variety of empirical challenges, such as debunking arguments and situationist critiques. The book attempts to provide a corrective to current trends in moral psychology, which celebrate emotion over reason and generate pessimism about the psychological mechanisms underlying commonsense morality. Ultimately, there is rationality in ethics not just despite but in virtue of the neurobiological and evolutionary materials that shape moral cognition and motivation.

Shame, Guilt and Morality

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrice Teroni ◽  
Otto Bruun
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
The Social ◽  
Shame And Guilt

AbstractThe connection between shame, guilt and morality is the topic of many recent debates. A broad tendency consists in attributing a higher moral status and a greater moral relevance to guilt, a claim motivated by arguments that tap into various areas of morality and moral psychology. The Pro-social Argument has it that guilt is, contrary to shame, morally good since it promotes pro-social behaviour. Three other arguments claim that only guilt has the requisite connection to central moral concepts: the Responsibility Argument appeals to the ties between guilt and responsibility, the Autonomy Argument to the heteronomy of shame and the Social Argument to shame's link with reputation. In this paper, we scrutinize these arguments and argue that they cannot support the conclusion that they try to establish. We conclude that a narrow focus on particular criteria and a misconception of shame and guilt have obscured the important roles shame plays in our moral lives.

Moral Psychology And Artificial Agents (Part 2): The Transhuman Connection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Laakasuo ◽  
Jukka Sundvall ◽  
Anton Berg ◽  
Jussi Palomäki ◽  
Marianna Drosinou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Wide Range

In this chapter we focus on some of the problems that novel trans-humanistic technologies pose to our moral cognition. We use an interdisciplinary approach for analyzing these problems and use a wide range of theories from e.g evolutionary psychology, moral psychology, anthropology and cognitive science.

Biology and Evolutionary Moral Psychology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Fedyk
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Late Pleistocene ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Evolutionary Moral Psychology

This chapter argues that it is not possible to make meaningful progress in moral psychology by attempting to derive conclusions about moral cognition from premises describing patterns of human behaviour that could have been adaptive in the late Pleistocene. The reason these inferences fail is that it is not possible to derive proximate explanations from ultimate explanations and vice-versa.

What Makes Moral Disgust Special? An Integrative Functional Review

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Giner-Sorolla ◽  
Tom Kupfer ◽  
John Sandor Sabo
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Functional Theory ◽  
Moral Relevance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moral Disgust ◽  
New Evidence

The role of disgust in moral psychology has been a matter of much controversy and experimentation over the past 20 or so years. We present here an integrative look at the literature, with a focus on experimental work in our lab that has shown differences between elicitors of disgust and anger in moral contexts, with disgust responding more to bodily-moral violations such as incest, and anger responding more to socio-moral violations such as theft. At the same time, new evidence suggests explanations for the sometimes-observed phenomenon of socio-moral disgust: it can react to perceptions of bad character in a person, or it might be a mere expressive strategy to impress others with your own good character. We review other literatures for moral relevance, such as the effects of incidental disgust, existential disgust, and individual differences in disgust. Evidence is currently scarce to clarify whether all forms of moral disgust are the same phenomenon as non-moral disgust, or whether perhaps it is an expressive mask layered on some other emotion. However, it is apparent that bodily-moral disgust has more in common with basic forms of disgust, than do other disgust reactions to moral wrongs. Within the scope of the literature, there is evidence that all four functions of Giner-Sorolla’s (2012) integrative functional theory of emotion (IFT) may be operating, and that their conflicts can help explain some of the paradoxes of disgust.

The difference between ice cream and Nazis: Moral externalization and the evolution of human cooperation

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Kyle Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Moral Norm ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Moral Demands

AbstractA range of empirical findings is first used to more precisely characterize our distinctive tendency to objectify or externalize moral demands and obligations, and it is then argued that this salient feature of our moral cognition represents a profound puzzle for evolutionary approaches to human moral psychology that existing proposals do not help resolve. It is then proposed that such externalization facilitated a broader shift to a vastly more cooperative form of social life by establishing and maintaining a connection between the extent to which an agent is herself motivated by a given moral norm and the extent to which she uses conformity to that same norm as a criterion in evaluating candidate partners in social interaction generally. This connection ensures the correlated interaction necessary to protect those prepared to adopt increasingly cooperative, altruistic, and other prosocial norms of interaction from exploitation, especially as such norms were applied in novel ways and/or to novel circumstances and as the rapid establishment of new norms allowed us to reap still greater rewards from hypercooperation. A wide range of empirical findings is then used to support this hypothesis, showing why the status we ascribe to moral demands and considerations exhibits the otherwise puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements that it does, as well as showing how the need to effectively advertise our externalization of particular moral commitments generates features of our social interaction so familiar that they rarely strike us as standing in need of any explanation in the first place.

scholarly journals Précis of Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua May
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Debunking Arguments ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Commonsense Morality

Regard for Reason in the Moral Mind argues that a careful examination of the scientific literature reveals a foundational role for reasoning in moral thought and action. Grounding moral psychology in reason then paves the way for a defense of moral knowledge and virtue against a variety of empirical challenges, such as debunking arguments and situationist critiques. The book attempts to provide a corrective to current trends in moral psychology, which celebrate emotion over reason and generate pessimism about the psychological mechanisms underlying commonsense morality. Ultimately, there is rationality in ethics not just despite but in virtue of the neurobiological and evolutionary materials that shape moral cognition and motivation.

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