Moral Psychology

What it asks

Moral theories make assumptions about people: that judgement is reasoning, that character is stable, that knowing what is right moves you toward doing it. Those are claims about how humans work, and they can be investigated.

The findings have not been comfortable. Much moral judgement looks like rapid intuition with reasons supplied afterwards. Behaviour varies with situation far more than with character. And the connection between judging and being moved is weaker than almost any theory assumes.

The hard part is what follows. A finding about how judgement works does not by itself show that any judgement is wrong - but ignoring it altogether means building theories for a creature nobody is.

The recurring problems

Whether reasoning follows judgement. If people reach a verdict intuitively and then construct justifications, moral argument may be doing something other than what it appears to be doing.

The situationist challenge. Behaviour turns out to depend heavily on features of the situation that seem morally irrelevant. If stable character traits are largely an illusion, virtue ethics is in trouble - and the defenders of virtue ethics have answered, at length.

Internalism about motivation. Does judging an act wrong necessarily involve some motivation not to do it? The psychopath is the standard test case and is contested in both directions.

Whether any of it is normative. Showing that a judgement has a disreputable cause does not show it is false. Showing that it has no better source than a disreputable cause might. Where that line falls is the branch's central methodological problem.

How it developed

The questions are ancient. Aristotle on habituation and on weakness of will, and Hume on reason as the slave of the passions, are both moral psychology in the full sense.

Twentieth-century developmental psychology treated moral growth as increasing sophistication in reasoning about justice. Carol Gilligan's criticism in 1982 - that the framework counted a whole style of moral thought, organised around care and relationship, as immature - reshaped the field and fed directly into care ethics.

From the late 1990s the empirical turn accelerated. Social intuitionist accounts argued that judgement comes first and reasoning after. Brain imaging of trolley cases suggested that different types of moral judgement recruit different processes, which was taken by some to explain away deontological intuitions and disputed hard by others.

Situationism arrived from social psychology at the same time and was aimed squarely at virtue ethics. That argument is still running, complicated by the fact that some of the best-known underlying studies have themselves been questioned.

The positions within it

Sentimentalism and rationalism divide over whether judgement is fundamentally affective or cognitive. Motivational internalism and externalism divide over whether judging entails being moved. Situationism and its virtue-ethical critics divide over character. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

This is the most interdisciplinary part of ethics and the most exposed to replication problems - several results that were treated as established a decade ago are no longer safe to cite.

The useful current work is more modest and better grounded: on how moral learning actually happens, on the relation between emotion and judgement without the sharp dichotomy, and on the standing question of when a causal explanation of a belief counts against it.