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Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide
by Benjamin G. Voyer Tor TarantolaThis fascinating and timely volume explores current thinking on vital topics in moral psychology, spanning the diverse disciplines that contribute to the field. Academics from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, anthropology, philosophy, and political science address ongoing and emerging questions aimed at understanding the thought processes and behaviors that underlie our moral codes—and our transgressions. Cross-cutting themes speak to individual, interpersonal, and collective morality in such areas as the development of ethical behavior, responses to violations of rules, moral judgments in the larger discourse, and universal versus specific norms. This wide-angle perspective also highlights the implications of moral psychology research for policy and justice, with cogent viewpoints from: · Philosophy: empiricism and normative questions, moral relativism. · Evolutionary biology: theories of how altruism and moral behavior evolved. · Anthropology: common moral values seen in ethnographies from different countries. · Cognitive and neural sciences: computational models of moral systems and decision-making. · Political science: politics, governance, and moral values in the public sphere. · Advice on moral psychology research—and thoughts about its future—from prominent scholars. With the goal of providing a truly multidisciplinary forum for moral psychology, this volume is sure to spark conversations across disciplines and advance the field as a whole. Sampling the breadth and depth of an equally expansive and transformative field, Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide will find an engaged audience among psychologists, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, lawyers, and policymakers, as well as a more general audience interested in better understanding the complexity of moral psychology research.
Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics
These ten original essays examine the moral and philosophical implications of developments in the science of ethics, the growing movement that seeks to use recent empirical findings to answer long-standing ethical questions. Efforts to make moral psychology a thoroughly empirical discipline have divided philosophers along methodological fault lines, isolating discussions that will profit more from intellectual exchange. This volume takes an even-handed approach, including essays from advocates of empirical ethics as well as those who are sceptical of some of its central claims. Some of these essays make novel use of empirical findings to develop philosophical research programs regarding such crucial moral phenomena as desire, emotion, and memory. Others bring new critical scrutiny to bear on some of the most influential proposals of the empirical ethics movement, including the claim that evolution undermines moral realism, the effort to recruit a dual-process model of the mind to support consequentialism against other moral theories, and the claim that ordinary evaluative judgments are seldom if ever sensitive to reasons, because moral reasoning is merely the post hoc rationalization of unthinking emotional response.
Moral Psychology (PDF)
by Daniel K LapsleyMoral functioning is a defining feature of human personhood and human social life. Moral Psychology provides an integrative and evaluative overview of the theoretical and empirical traditions that have attempted to make sense of moral cognition, prosocial behaviour, and the development of virtuous character. This is the first book to integrate a comprehensive review of the psychological literatures with allied traditions in ethics. Moral rationality and decision making; the development of the sense of fairness and justice, and of prosocial dispositions; as well as the notion of moral self and moral identity and their relation to issues of character and virtue are fully discussed in the rich contexts provided by psychological and philosophical paradigms. Lapsley emphasizes parenting and educational strategies for influencing moral behaviour, reasoning, and character development, and charts a line of research for the ?post-Kohlbergian era? in moral psychology. This book will be an invaluable text for advanced courses in moral psychology, as taught in departments of psychology, education, and philosophy. It will also prove to be a standard reference work for researchers and ethicists alike.
Moral Psychology Today: Essays on Values, Rational Choice, and the Will (Philosophical Studies Series #110)
by David K. ChanThis volume is an edited collection of original papers on the theme of "Values, Rational Choice, and the Will". The editor is a Stanford-trained moral philosopher, and the organizer of a conference held on April 1-3, 2004. The conference succeeded in bringing together a wide range of essays that dealt with most of the central questions of moral philosophy today, in both normative ethics and meta-ethics, theoretical and applied ethics, and especially in moral psychology.
Moral Psychology with Nietzsche
by Brian LeiterBrian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. Leiter presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsche's moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and its relationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his scepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits. In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engages the views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in both philosophy and psychology.
Moral Psychology with Nietzsche
by Brian LeiterBrian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. Leiter presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsche's moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and its relationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his scepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits. In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engages the views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in both philosophy and psychology.
The Moral Punishment Instinct (Perspectives on Justice and Morality)
by Jan-Willem van ProoijenPunishment of offenders is one of the most universal features of human behavior. Across time and cultures it has been common for people to punish offenders, and one can easily find examples of punishment among ancient hunter-gatherers, in holy scriptures, in popular culture, and in contemporary courts of law. Punishment is not restricted to criminal offenders, but emerges within all spheres of our social life, including corporations, public institutions, traffic, sports matches, schools, parenting, and more. Punishment strongly influences what we think, how we feel, and what we do. The Moral Punishment Instinct asserts that people possess a hard-wired tendency to aggress against those who violate the norms of their group. We have evolved this instinct because of its power to control behavior by curbing selfishness and free-riding, thereby providing incentives to stimulate the mutual cooperation that ancient hunter-gatherers needed in order to survive in challenging natural environments. In this book, Jan-Willem van Prooijen methodically describes how punishment originates from moral emotions, stimulates cooperation, and shapes the social life of human beings. Guided by a host of recognizable and relatable examples, this book illuminates how the moral punishment instinct manifests itself among a variety of modern human cultures, children, tribes of hunter-gatherers, and even non-human animals-all while accounting for the role of this instinct in religion, war, racial bias, restorative justice, gossip, torture, and radical terrorism.
The Moral Punishment Instinct (Perspectives on Justice and Morality)
by Jan-Willem van ProoijenPunishment of offenders is one of the most universal features of human behavior. Across time and cultures it has been common for people to punish offenders, and one can easily find examples of punishment among ancient hunter-gatherers, in holy scriptures, in popular culture, and in contemporary courts of law. Punishment is not restricted to criminal offenders, but emerges within all spheres of our social life, including corporations, public institutions, traffic, sports matches, schools, parenting, and more. Punishment strongly influences what we think, how we feel, and what we do. The Moral Punishment Instinct asserts that people possess a hard-wired tendency to aggress against those who violate the norms of their group. We have evolved this instinct because of its power to control behavior by curbing selfishness and free-riding, thereby providing incentives to stimulate the mutual cooperation that ancient hunter-gatherers needed in order to survive in challenging natural environments. In this book, Jan-Willem van Prooijen methodically describes how punishment originates from moral emotions, stimulates cooperation, and shapes the social life of human beings. Guided by a host of recognizable and relatable examples, this book illuminates how the moral punishment instinct manifests itself among a variety of modern human cultures, children, tribes of hunter-gatherers, and even non-human animals-all while accounting for the role of this instinct in religion, war, racial bias, restorative justice, gossip, torture, and radical terrorism.
The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations
by Christian Reus-SmitThis book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral diplomacy? Why did the city-states of Renaissance Italy develop a system of oratorical diplomacy, while the states of absolutist Europe relied on naturalist international law and "old diplomacy"? Conventional explanations of basic institutional practices have difficulty accounting for such variation. Christian Reus-Smit addresses this problem by presenting an alternative, "constructivist" theory of international institutional development, one that emphasizes the relationship between the social identity of the state and the nature and origin of basic institutional practices. Reus-Smit argues that international societies are shaped by deep constitutional structures that are based on prevailing beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, the organizing principle of sovereignty, and the norm of procedural justice. These structures inform the imaginations of institutional architects as they develop and adjust institutional arrangements between states. As he shows with detailed reference to ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist Europe, and the modern world, different cultural and historical contexts lead to profoundly different constitutional structures and institutional practices. The first major study of its kind, this book is a significant addition to our theoretical and empirical understanding of international relations, past and present.
The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics #119)
by Christian Reus-SmitThis book seeks to explain why different systems of sovereign states have built different types of fundamental institutions to govern interstate relations. Why, for example, did the ancient Greeks operate a successful system of third-party arbitration, while international society today rests on a combination of international law and multilateral diplomacy? Why did the city-states of Renaissance Italy develop a system of oratorical diplomacy, while the states of absolutist Europe relied on naturalist international law and "old diplomacy"? Conventional explanations of basic institutional practices have difficulty accounting for such variation. Christian Reus-Smit addresses this problem by presenting an alternative, "constructivist" theory of international institutional development, one that emphasizes the relationship between the social identity of the state and the nature and origin of basic institutional practices. Reus-Smit argues that international societies are shaped by deep constitutional structures that are based on prevailing beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, the organizing principle of sovereignty, and the norm of procedural justice. These structures inform the imaginations of institutional architects as they develop and adjust institutional arrangements between states. As he shows with detailed reference to ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, absolutist Europe, and the modern world, different cultural and historical contexts lead to profoundly different constitutional structures and institutional practices. The first major study of its kind, this book is a significant addition to our theoretical and empirical understanding of international relations, past and present.
Moral Questions: An Introduction to Ethics
by Jon NuttallThis new introduction to ethics is written for students who are approaching philosophy for the first time.
Moral Questions: An Introduction to Ethics
by Jon NuttallThis new introduction to ethics is written for students who are approaching philosophy for the first time.
Moral Questions: by Rush Rhees (Swansea Studies in Philosophy)
by R. RheesRush Rhees questions the viability of moral theories and the general claims they make in ethics. He shows how one can both be concerned with knowing what one ought to do while recognising that one's answer is a personal one. These insights, arrived at in a distinctive style, characteristic of Rhees, are then applied to issues of life and death, human sexuality and our relations to animals. To recognise why philosophy cannot answer such questions for us is an affirmation, not a denial, of their importance.
Moral Realism (Bloomsbury Ethics)
by Kevin DeLappAre moral values objective or are they relative to different cultural contexts and traditions? Do values have any place in a 'disenchanted' scientific conception of the world and, if so, how do human beings relate to such values culturally, psychologically, and epistemologically? This book examines contemporary responses to these questions.Moral Realism introduces students to contemporary debates concerning moral realism, including issues related to ethical naturalism, moral epistemology, moral motivation, cultural pluralism and moral disagreement. In the context of examining and connecting these different debates, the book presents its own unique form of moral realism according to which values may be belief-independent while also being characterized by an ontological pluralism that generates incommensurable moral disagreements and 'tragic' dilemmas. This idea serves as a guiding thread and also represents an attractive and neglected metaethical position in its own right. Specific attention is devoted to locating debates about moral realism in actual, embodied contexts, by looking to issues in experimental moral psychology, cross-cultiural anthropology and political science, permitting an accessible approach ideal for undergraduate students.
Moral Realism (Bloomsbury Ethics)
by Kevin DeLappAre moral values objective or are they relative to different cultural contexts and traditions? Do values have any place in a 'disenchanted' scientific conception of the world and, if so, how do human beings relate to such values culturally, psychologically, and epistemologically? This book examines contemporary responses to these questions.Moral Realism introduces students to contemporary debates concerning moral realism, including issues related to ethical naturalism, moral epistemology, moral motivation, cultural pluralism and moral disagreement. In the context of examining and connecting these different debates, the book presents its own unique form of moral realism according to which values may be belief-independent while also being characterized by an ontological pluralism that generates incommensurable moral disagreements and 'tragic' dilemmas. This idea serves as a guiding thread and also represents an attractive and neglected metaethical position in its own right. Specific attention is devoted to locating debates about moral realism in actual, embodied contexts, by looking to issues in experimental moral psychology, cross-cultiural anthropology and political science, permitting an accessible approach ideal for undergraduate students.
Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine (New Directions in Ethics #3)
by Matthew H. KramerIn this major new work, Matthew Kramer seeks to establish two main conclusions. On the one hand, moral requirements are strongly objective. On the other hand, the objectivity of ethics is itself an ethical matter that rests primarily on ethical considerations. Moral realism - the doctrine that morality is indeed objective - is a moral doctrine. Major new volume in our new series New Directions in Ethics Takes on the big picture - defending the objectivity of ethics whilst rejecting the grounds of much of the existing debate between realists and anti-realists Cuts across both ethical theory and metaethics Distinguished by the quality of the scholarship and its ambitious range
Moral Reality
by Paul BloomfieldWe typically assume that the standard for what is beautiful lies in the eye of the beholder. Yet this is not the case when we consider morality; what we deem morally good is not usually a matter of opinion. Such thoughts push us toward being realists about moral properties, but a cogent theory of moral realism has long been an elusive philosophical goal. Paul Bloomfield here offers a rigorous defense of moral realism, developing an ontology for morality that models the property of being morally good on the property of being physically healthy. The model is assembled systematically; it first presents the metaphysics of healthiness and goodness, then explains our epistemic access to properties such as these, adds a complementary analysis of the semantics and syntax of moral discourse, and finishes with a discussion of how we become motivated to act morally. Bloomfield closely attends to the traditional challenges facing moral realism, and the discussion nimbly ranges from modern medical theory to ancient theories of virtue, and from animal navigation to the nature of normativity. Maintaining a highly readable style throughout, Moral Reality yields one of the most compelling theories of moral realism to date and will appeal to philosophers working on issues in metaphysics or moral philosophy.
Moral Reality
by Paul BloomfieldWe typically assume that the standard for what is beautiful lies in the eye of the beholder. Yet this is not the case when we consider morality; what we deem morally good is not usually a matter of opinion. Such thoughts push us toward being realists about moral properties, but a cogent theory of moral realism has long been an elusive philosophical goal. Paul Bloomfield here offers a rigorous defense of moral realism, developing an ontology for morality that models the property of being morally good on the property of being physically healthy. The model is assembled systematically; it first presents the metaphysics of healthiness and goodness, then explains our epistemic access to properties such as these, adds a complementary analysis of the semantics and syntax of moral discourse, and finishes with a discussion of how we become motivated to act morally. Bloomfield closely attends to the traditional challenges facing moral realism, and the discussion nimbly ranges from modern medical theory to ancient theories of virtue, and from animal navigation to the nature of normativity. Maintaining a highly readable style throughout, Moral Reality yields one of the most compelling theories of moral realism to date and will appeal to philosophers working on issues in metaphysics or moral philosophy.
Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)
by Thomas PölzlerAre there objective moral truths (things that are morally right or wrong independently of what anybody thinks about them)? To answer this question more and more scholars have recently begun to appeal to evidence from scientific disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. This book investigates this novel scientific approach in a comprehensive, empirically focused, partly clarificatory, and partly metatheoretical way. It argues for two main theses. First, it is possible for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. And second, most appeals to science that have so far been proposed are insufficiently empirically substantiated. The book’s main chapters address four prominent science-based arguments for or against the existence of objective moral truths: the presumptive argument, the argument from moral disagreement, the sentimentalist argument, and the evolutionary debunking argument. For each of these arguments Thomas Pölzler first identifies the sense in which its underlying empirical hypothesis would have to be true in order for the argument to work. Then he shows that the available scientific evidence fails to support this hypothesis. Finally, he also makes suggestions as to how to test the hypothesis more validly in future scientific research. Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences is an important contribution to the moral realism/anti-realism debate that will appeal both to philosophers and scientists interested in moral psychology and metaethics.
Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences (Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory)
by Thomas PölzlerAre there objective moral truths (things that are morally right or wrong independently of what anybody thinks about them)? To answer this question more and more scholars have recently begun to appeal to evidence from scientific disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. This book investigates this novel scientific approach in a comprehensive, empirically focused, partly clarificatory, and partly metatheoretical way. It argues for two main theses. First, it is possible for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. And second, most appeals to science that have so far been proposed are insufficiently empirically substantiated. The book’s main chapters address four prominent science-based arguments for or against the existence of objective moral truths: the presumptive argument, the argument from moral disagreement, the sentimentalist argument, and the evolutionary debunking argument. For each of these arguments Thomas Pölzler first identifies the sense in which its underlying empirical hypothesis would have to be true in order for the argument to work. Then he shows that the available scientific evidence fails to support this hypothesis. Finally, he also makes suggestions as to how to test the hypothesis more validly in future scientific research. Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences is an important contribution to the moral realism/anti-realism debate that will appeal both to philosophers and scientists interested in moral psychology and metaethics.
Moral Reason (Oxford Philosophical Monographs)
by Julia MarkovitsWhat is it to have a reason to do something? is one sort of question; what is it we have reason to do? is another. These questions are often explored separately. But our answers to them may not be independent: what reasons are may have implications for what reasons there are. So the door is opened to a troubling tension—the account of what reasons are that is most plausible in its own right could entail a view of what we have reason to do that is independently implausible. In fact, it looks like this is the case. In the first half of Moral Reason, Julia Markovits develops and defends a version of a desire-based, internalist, account of what normative reasons are. But does that account entail that there are no moral reasons that apply to all of us, regardless of what we happen to desire? It may look obvious that it does—that a bullet must be bitten somewhere. If what we have reason to do depends on what we antecedently desire, corrected only for misinformation and procedural irrationalities, and if desires differ from person to person, there seems to be no basis for assuming that everyone has reason to be moral. But the bullet may yet be avoided. In the second half of the book, Markovits shows how we may do so, building on Kant's argument for his formula of humanity to provide an internalist defense of universal moral reasons. In doing so, she provides a more satisfying answer to the age-old question: why be moral?
Moral - Recht - Nation: Die Soziologie der Solidarität Gaston Richards (1860-1945)
by Christian Papilloud Cécile RolIndem er eine Soziologie der Solidarität entwickelte, die als ernsthafte Alternative zum durkheimschen Programm betrachtet wurde, nimmt Gaston Richard einen besonderen Platz im Pantheon der Gründerväter der Soziologie in Frankreich ein. Das vorliegende Buch bietet ein detailliertes Panorama dieser historischen Rechtssoziologie an, die Richard auf Grundlage eines relationalen, aus der Moral gewonnenen Ansatzes entwickelte. Richards Instrumentarium, das eine starke Nähe zum deutschen Formalismus aufzeigt, diente einer soziologischen Erkenntnis, die eine praktische Lösung gesellschaftlicher Probleme, insbesondere auf europäischen und internationalen Ebenen, zum Ziel hatte.Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg radikalisierte Richard sein Programm. Die zunehmende Ambivalenz, die er gegenüber der deutschsprachigen Soziologie wegen seiner Auffassung des Staates und des Völkerrechts dann zeigte, deutete auf einen identitären, insbesondere im Rahmen seines Engagements für die protestantische Stiftung La Cause sichtbaren Nationalismus, den Richard vergeblich mit seiner Soziologie der Solidarität zu verbinden versuchte, um die französische Soziologie neu zu definieren. Der Band schließt mit Richards bibliographischem Werk, einer Liste seiner akademischen Lehrveranstaltungen und einem Unikat zum italienischen Faschismus ab.Der InhaltEinleitung • Die Willenstheorie und die Soziologie als ethische Soziologie • Kritik des Organizismus • Kritik des Positivismus • Gaston Richards Wirtschaftssoziologie • Von der Berufsmoral zur staatsbürgerlichen Moral – oder die deutsche Frage • La Cause • Rück- und Ausblick • Anhang A: Le fascisme et l’anti-fascisme • Anhang B: Werk von Gaston Richard • Anhang C: Lehrveranstaltungen von Gaston Richard.Die AutorenDr. Christian Papilloud ist Professor für Soziologie an der Universität Halle-Wittenberg.Dr. Cécile Rol lehrt am Institut für Soziologie der Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
Moral Reflection
by W. RansomeThis exploration of virtue ethics offers an original theory in moral philosophy, identifying a 'moral reflection' as a virtue that has not yet been considered properly by philosophers. The author argues that taking our moral lives seriously must involve some reflection on our moral past.
Moral Respect, Objectification, and Health Care
by Meredith Celene SchwartzThis book fills an important gap in existing health care ethics literature by describing an egalitarian conception of moral respect which applies to autonomous and non-autonomous patients alike. It reframes questions about respect, from its target to the role that respect plays in our moral lives. Taking into account various forms of objectification, it suggests that the unique role of moral respect is to recognize a person as more than a mere object; to recognize them as an equally intrinsically valuable being who possesses dignity. Further, the book argues that respect is central to health care because medicine and experiences of illness are both inherently objectifying. Objectification is sometimes morally permissible, and other times morally troubling—a context of respect can help to distinguish between these situations. Because we can reduce others to mere objects in ways other than violating or denying their autonomy, the approach presented here can also accommodate non-autonomous patients directly without considering them as marginal cases.
The Moral Responsibilities of Companies (Palgrave Studies in Ethics and Public Policy)
by C. ChappleThe Moral Responsibilities of Companies is a philosophical analysis of the question of whether companies can be held morally responsible for the harms they create, and what implications such a view has on the moral position of employees and shareholders in these companies.