Morality
Perspectives on Psychological Science, Forthcoming
17 Pages Posted: 4 Dec 2007
There are 2 versions of this paper
Morality (in Handbook of Social Psychology)
Abstract
Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions. In this essay I show how both of these lines have been shaped by an older debate between two 19th century narratives about modernity, one celebrating the liberation of individuals, the other mourning the loss of community and moral authority. I suggest that both lines of moral psychology have limited themselves to the moral domain prescribed by the liberation narrative, and so one future step for moral psychology should be to study alternative moral perspectives, particularly religious and politically conservative ones, in which morality is in part about protecting groups, institutions, and souls.
Keywords: morality, moral psychology, intuition, evolution
JEL Classification: Z00
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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