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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Contemporary Social Issues
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides a systematic framework for understanding and shaping moral action
Taking Moral Action offers a timely and comprehensive overview of the emerging field of moral psychology, introducing readers to one of the most vibrant areas of research in contemporary psychology. With an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, authors Chuck Huff and Almut Furchert incorporate a wide range of scholarly traditions, philosophical theories, empirical findings, and practical moral writings to explore the complex network of influences, contexts, and processes involved in producing and structuring moral action.
Integrating key empirical and theoretical literature, this unique volume helps readers grasp the different aspects of both habitual and intentional acts of moral action. Thematically organized chapters examine moral action in contexts such as evolution, moral ecology, personality, moral identity and the self, moral reason, moral emotion, and more. Each chapter features a discussion of how neuroscience underlies or supports the influence and process addressed. Throughout the book, historical stories of moral action and examples of humanistic and experiential traditions of moral formation highlight what is possible, relevant, and appropriate in taking moral action in a variety of settings.
- Explores the relationships between moral psychology, empirical psychology, philosophy, and theology
- Considers the various ways that individuals experience and construct moral identity
- Emphasizes the practical application of the science of morality in service of moral good
- Reviews cultural, organizational, group, and social influences to investigate how individuals actively shape their moral environment
- Discusses the role of emotions in morality and considers if individuals can change or train their emotional responses
Taking Moral Action is essential reading for those new to the field and experienced practitioners alike. Containing extensive references and links to further readings, Taking Moral Action is also an excellent textbook for college and university courses in areas such as psychology, ethics, theology, philosophy, anthropology, and neuroscience.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface
Introduction
I.1 A Very Brief History of Moral Psychology
I.2 A Fragmented Field
I.3 Stories of Moral Action
I.4 Considering the Scope of Moral Action
I.5 Underlying Tensions in the Field
I.6 Mapping the Landscape of Moral Action: The Book’s Structure
I.7 Further Reading
References
Part I: Contexts
1 Evolution
1.1 The Social Brain
1.2 Basic Evolutionary Processes (With an Eye Toward Morality)
1.3 How to Argue That Behavior Was Selected Because It Was Adaptive
1.4 Evolutionary Building Blocks for a Robust Morality
1.5 Human Distinctiveness: How Large is the Gap?
1.6 Discussion
1.7 Further Readings
References
2 Neuroscience of Moral Action
2.1 Neural Systems and Moral Function, or How to use Neuroscience
2.2 Moral Ecology
2.3 Personality
2.4 Moral Identity and the Self
2.5 Skills and Knowledge
2.6 Moral Reason
2.7 Moral Emotion
2.8 Moral Formation
2.9 Discussion
2.10 Further Readings
References
3 Moral Ecology
3.1 How Moral Ecology Changes the Conversation
3.2 Culture and Moral Diversity
3.3 Moral Ecology at the Organization Level
3.4 Close Relationships in Friendship and Community
3.5 Influencing the Moral Ecology
3.6 Discussion
3.7 Further Readings
References
Part II: Influences
4 Personality
4.1 Beyond Character as Traits
4.2 Personality Influences on Moral Action
4.3 Discussion
4.4 Further Readings
References
5 Moral Identity and the Self
5.1 From the Judgment–Action Gap to Moral Identity
5.2 The Varieties of Self: Or What is Moral Identity?
5.3 How Does the Moral Self‐Concept Influence Action?
5.4 Critiques of the Moral Self
5.5 Discussion
5.6 Further Readings
References
6 Skills and Knowledge
6.1 General Skills
6.2 Domain‐Specific Skills
6.3 Expert Performance
6.4 Habits
6.5 Skills Go Awry
6.6 Discussion
6.7 Further Readings
References
Part III: Processes
7 Moral Reason
7.1 What Kind of Reason?
7.2 Kohlberg, Relativism, and Moral Reason
7.3 Implicit Cognition and Two‐Process Models
7.4 Naturalistic Moral Cognition
7.5 Reasoning Goes Awry: Two Paths to Moral Failure
7.6 Discussion
7.7 Further Readings
References
8 Moral Emotion
8.1 An Overview of Theories of Emotion
8.2 The Moral Emotions
8.3 Learning Moral Emotions
8.4 Discussion
8.5 Further Readings
References
9 Moral Formation
9.1 Traditional Accounts of Moral Formation
9.2 Evaluative–Self‐Transformative Aspects of Moral Formation
9.3 Normative/Self‐Transcending Aspects of Moral Formation
9.4 Educative Aspects of Moral Formation
9.5 Discussion
9.6 Further Readings
References
Coda: Taking Moral Action
C.1 Revisiting Our Initial Themes
C.2 Toward a Theoretical Framework for Moral Psychology
C.3 An Adaptable Framework
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 The variety of moral consistencies.
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Characteristic properties of dual‐process cognition.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Schwartz circle of value regions.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 A model of some of the components of the self.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 A vastly simplified version of the Wrzus and Roberts (2017) model...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Schwartz circle of value regions.
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Schwartz circle of value regions.
Guide
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface
Introduction
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Coda: Taking Moral Action
Index
Wiley End User License Agreement
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Contemporary Social Issues
Contemporary Social Issues, a book series authored by leading experts in the field, focuses on psychological inquiry and research relevant to social issues facing individuals, groups, communities, and society at large. Each volume is written for scholars, students, practitioners, and policy‐makers.
Series Editor: Daniel Perlman
Multiculturalism and Diversity: A Social Psychological PerspectiveBernice Lott
The Psychological Wealth of Nations: Do Happy People Make a Happy Society?Shigehiro Oishi
Women and Poverty: Psychology, Public Policy, and Social JusticeHeather Bullock
Taking Moral ActionChuck Huff and Almut Furchert
Taking Moral Action
Chuck Huff and Almut Furchert
This edition first published 2024© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Huff, Chuck, author. | Furchert, Almut, author.Title: Taking moral action / Chuck Huff and Almut Furchert.Description: First edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2023001524 (print) | LCCN 2023001525 (ebook) | ISBN 9781444335378 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118818077 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118818060 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Evolutionary psychology. | Brain. | Social problems–Psychological aspects. | Immorality.Classification: LCC BF698.95 .H84 2024 (print) | LCC BF698.95 (ebook) | DDC 155.7–dc23/eng/20230322LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001524LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023001525
Cover image: WileyCover Image: © James He Qi, www.heqiart.com
This book is dedicated to Kelly Shaver, John Darley, and Wes Brown.
Each has been a central actor in the moral ecology that has shaped me and my approach to scholarship.
Preface
This book is for anyone who wants to think carefully about the psychology of morality. This includes, of course, scholars and students in philosophy, psychology, and religion. But it is also for those in the many allied disciplines (e.g. criminology, pastoral care, peace studies, political science, social work, etc.) that are taking and supporting moral action in the world. More widely, we have tried to write it to be accessible to any careful reader interested in the topic, regardless of background. We hope it will provide you with a feeling for the wide variety of things one needs to consider to achieve an adequate understanding of what is today called moral psychology.
This book is an attempt to understand: (1) why people take moral action; and (2) the individual’s experience of actually doing so. The first task requires us to gather many different empirical literatures on the contexts, influences, and processes that explain why people take moral action. These literatures are what has come to be called moral psychology. The second task requires us to reframe those literature reviews in terms of the experience of the individual taking moral action. This second task, then, leads us into existential, philosophical, and theological concerns. The tension between these two tasks, the general/scientific and the individual/existential, allows us to use conceptual and empirical techniques from each approach to illuminate the other, thereby helping us to understand both better.
The first author (CH) is an American empirically minded social psychologist who has pursued applied ethical issues within the world of computing and software design. One research program has been experimental investigations of gender bias in computing systems and the other has focused on life story interviews of moral exemplars in software design. His work here has been to corral the wide‐ranging literatures and organize and present them in a digestible fashion.
The second author (AF) is a practicing German philosopher and psychologist with expertise in existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic traditions as well as in the intersection of continental philosophy and applied psychology. She came to the project mainly to offer some hermeneutical tools to better map the landscape of the field, help create a narrative that connects loose ends, and bring some philosophical coherence to the categories and distinctions made in the text, thus creating the space in which the empirical focus of the text can stand.
Together, we reject the idea that it is useful to restrict moral psychology to any singular definition of morality, and instead encourage opening up the scope of “the moral” to all the interesting places one might find it. Our approach to framing the field is more like what used to be called natural history:1 a wide‐ranging approach to collecting the phenomena of interest wherever they are. It is not theory‐driven science but it embraces and uses theory‐driven science. Nor is it the amateur collection of occasional specimens – we try instead to systematically seek out naturally occurring variety and pattern in the phenomena of interest. Thus, this overview of moral psychology will be broader than others. We hope this breadth helps to heal some of the fragmentation in the field, placing often‐isolated literatures in conversations with each other.
Our goal is to expand the horizons of the field of moral psychology and to deepen and structure the complexities that one can find there. As you approach this book, you will find it useful to read the Introduction first, and then perhaps the short Coda. Both chapters will give you a feeling for our approach and help frame your reading of the more specialized chapters. The other chapters are designed to be read in any sequence. They are heavily interdependent, as evidenced by the numerous cross‐references to other chapters within each. One way to read the book is to follow these interconnections, starting with a chapter of interest, then deciding what to read next based on your interest and the interconnections. One can also read it straight through as a broad (if not exhaustive) overview of the field.
Gratitude
A project this wide‐ranging and long in gestation will have a host of people and institutions to thank. I beg your indulgence and ask that you actually read this list to give some honor to all those who have supported a project because they thought it was the right thing to do. They, of course, have no responsibility for errors or omissions in the project. I would, however, appreciate hearing from you if you find places where the text might be improved.
Thanks to Mark Snyder, the SPSSI books series editor, who read an initial book proposal that was focused narrowly on moral exemplars in computer science and helped transform it into a much more ambitious project. Thanks are also due to the initial reviewers Mark recruited who agreed that the ambitious project was a great idea but also likely impossible to complete. Fourteen years later, we can say the reviewers were right on both points.
Dan Perlman, the editor of the SPSSI series who took over from Mark Snyder, has been an unceasing voice of optimism and support in a long and difficult project. He helped us keep going when things were stalled, provided close reading and incisive commentary of his own, recruited a group of advisors and reviewers who have shaped the book in many ways, and more importantly, helped us to decide when to continue and when to quit improving things. Dan recruited several reviewers for early drafts of the manuscript. All were very helpful, but I want particularly to thank Jessica Salvatore for her close reading of almost the whole manuscript. She suggested revisions that opened new dimensions of variation in moral action and provided her encouragement to continue.
Laura Barnard Crosskey, my student and co‐author on several papers, initially agreed to help as second author. While she was completing her doctoral work in Clinical Psychology at Duke (with a parallel MDiv), she wisely decided that she could no longer participate. Still, the project shows signs of her influence in its interdisciplinary approach and its careful attention to human detail in the case studies. She is now a clinical psychologist in Chapel Hill, NC.
Ken Fleischmann, Bill Frey, Charles Harris, Francis Harvey, Deborah Johnson, Keith Miller, Helen Nissenbaum, Michael Pritchard, Simon Rogerson, and Katie Shilton have been early colleagues in work on ethical design of software. Though none are psychologists, I have learned more from them about moral action than from many psychology textbooks. Philosophers Rosalind Hursthouse and Linda Zagzebski, both experts in virtue theory, were gracious in conversations that helped me check my understanding of the area. Philosophers Anthony Rudd and John Davenport provided the same gracious service on narrative and the self.
Both Almut and I have been hospitably received at numerous monasteries in the United States and Europe as we have taken advantage of the scholarly atmosphere in these places to write, and to re‐re‐write. Foremost among these is the Studium program run by Sister Ann Marie Biermaier of St. Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, MN. She and the Benedictine community there have admirably displayed the virtue of hospitality to scholars and interdisciplinary projects from across the globe. We have spent many cold (and some warm) months there shaping this book. Our daughter, now four years old, considers the monastery a second home. They have managed, without complaint, to clear almost all the crayon markings from the walls and furniture. Our daughter has also inspired the book cover, taken from a Kees de Kort illustration for the good Samaritan, her favorite bedtime story.
Other houses that have welcomed us for writing, and thereby contributed to this book, include the Jesuit Graduate School of Philosophy in Munich, specifically Professors Rüdiger Funiok and Eckhard Frick; St. Ottilien Arch Abbey in Eresing, Bavaria, particularly Fr. Otto Betler; St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville MN and Stadtkloster Segen, Berlin.
Simon Rogerson at DeMontfort University, Leicester UK, provided a year’s housing, the collegiality of the Center for Computing and Social Responsibility, and access to his extensive network of connections to support my work in moral exemplars in computing, which in the end produced the book proposal that morphed unexpectedly into this book.
The empirical and theoretical work that led to this book has been partially supported by a series of grants from the National Science Foundation [DUE‐9980786, DUE‐9972280, SES‐0217298, and SVS‐0822640]. Of course, any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. They may not even represent our current views when you read this (see the Introduction for how some theorists’ definitions of the moral domain change over time). We have also received generous sabbatical and other grant support from St. Olaf College. In the liberal arts tradition, my colleagues in the computer science, philosophy, psychology, and religion departments have been very supportive, often reading drafts of chapters related to their specialty and commenting on them.
The text has benefited from over ten years of classroom testing in my advanced seminar on The Psychology of Good and Evil. The students’ essay exams helped me understand which points were clear and which needed reconceptualization. Their comments in class shaped the creation of the ideas in revision. Like any good seminar class, we together created theory.
People who responded to queries, sometimes simply with attached PDFs, but more often with extensive conversations about work in their specialty, include: Adam Alter, Gordon Bear, Daniele Bertini, Evamaria Bohle, Nathan Cartagena, Michael Davis, Nathan DeWall, Nick Epley, Charles Ess, Jeremy Frimer, Brendan Gaesser, Richard Gaillardetz, Michael Gill, Patrick Henry, Steven Hitlin, Darrell Jodock, Matt Keefer, Scott Krepsky, Madoka Kumashiro, Thomas Lambert, Daniel Lapsley, Emmett Larsen, Elliott Lee, Jeremy Loebach, Tina Malti, Deborah Mower, Gary Muir, Michael Mumford, Danny Munoz‐Hutchinson, Darcia Narvaez, Helen Nissenbaum, Monisha Pasupathi, Leigh Phillips, George Pollak, Alan Preti, Americus Reed, Sabine Roeser, Jessica Roth, Alex Rothman, Jochen Sautermeister, Douglas Schuurman, Shalom Schwartz, Anthony Seebok, Katie Shilton, June Tangney, Kris Thalhammer, Steve Thoma, Stefanie Tignor, Carlo Veltri, and David Wulff.
Among library staff, I want particularly to thank Kasia Gonnerman for her extensive interdisciplinary expertise that allowed me to find, and more importantly to access, literature in a wide variety of disciplines. She once used her research skills to help me return a wallet I found in Chicago to its rightful owner in a small village in southern Poland. After Kasia moved on to greener pastures, this project was ably supported by librarians Brian Conlan, Charlie Priori, and Audrey Gunn.
And, of course, I am deeply grateful to my wife, partner, and second author Dr. Almut Furchert. First, for continuing to support the long, fourteen‐year journey of this book even as it stole precious time from us. Second, for bringing perspective and philosophical theory that has turned my fragmented intuitions about moral psychology into something resembling a philosophical framework and has shaped the psychological conceptions we propose. And finally, for her close editorial eye that has made each chapter far more readable than it might have been. She has helped me to become the scholar, and the person, I have hoped to be.
Chuck Huff
March 2023
Stadtkloster Segen, Berlin
Note
1
And is called by historians of science “Humboldtian Science” (see the Introduction for more on this).
Introduction
“Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.”
Kurt Lewin (1946, p. 35)
“There is nothing as practical as a good theory.”
Kurt Lewin (1945, p. 129)
Why are people good (or not)? What motivates moral actors and moral action? What is moral action and which actions are moral? In ethics and morality, these are all beginners’ questions and puzzles pondered across the ages and cultures. To phrase them in psychological terms: What contexts, influences and processes, both within and outside the person, structure and support moral action? Or more briefly: How do people take moral action and become more (or less) moral?
But even these oddly phrased questions are not simply psychological. In multiple cultures, they have been studied and contemplated in many strands of philosophical inquiry and by numerous devotees of various religions. And they operate at least at two levels: an abstract and theoretical one and an urgently personal and practical one. We want both to know what the good is and how to become good.
Let us begin with this tension between the abstract/theoretical and the personal/practical. The two quotes that begin this Introduction are from one of the founders of social psychology. They seem at odds: one denigrates theory and the other praises it. But Lewin’s point was more subtle. As both a great theorist and a founder of applied social psychology, he knew from experience that abstract puzzles untethered from real social situations produce a misleading picture of the complexity of the human condition. He also knew that good theory, fittingly applied, can drive practical change in the world. Lewin’s exhortation to balance theory with practice is surely relevant in the rapidly unfolding field of moral psychology. But achieving this balance is not just a methodological issue: it requires some grasp of the range and complexity facing the field.
That is the task we grapple with in this text. Our attempt to provide a first overview of the emerging but highly fragmented field of moral psychology is for both those beginning in the field and those deep in the weeds and thickets of theoretical controversy. It hopes to account for the complexity of the human condition as it is lived in real lives (Callaway & Strawn, 2020), and to provide a framework that will help harness the explanatory power of moral psychology in understanding and shaping moral action.
The title Taking Moral Action is an attempt to encompass the complexities of the field. Moral action explicitly names a behavioral outcome, the actual action that we call moral. The verb “taking” implies a complex web of processes accompanying the action: interior actions like planning, practicing, critiquing, judging, and evaluating that might precede, guide, and evaluate our exterior moral action like helping, organizing, protesting, or even refusing to act. Action itself signifies the intentional character of moral action (contra behavior, response, etc.), though it also allows for habitual or highly routinized performances. And it presumes a context within which that moral action makes sense, a context that both facilitates and constrains the action. Lastly the attribute “moral” signifies that the action we are interested in is related to a moral standard, value, or goal; a moral “ought” that signifies the normative expectations, evaluations, and judgments that cultures, societies, groups, and individuals make.
The chapter structure of the book is a first attempt to gather, structure, and integrate the scattered but profound empirical literatures that help us grasp different aspects of the complexity of the interior/exterior and habitual/intentional acts that we call moral action. Thus, we gather and discuss empirical literatures that consider: (1) knowledge of the evolutionary, neurological, and culturalcontexts of the human condition; (2) the influences of personality, moral identity, and the skills and knowledge needed to support moral action; and (3) the processes of moral reason, moral emotion, and moral formation that occur both instantaneously in any situation and across the life span.
Keeping this broad span of topics in mind can help, in hermeneutic terms,1 to expand the horizon of our understanding of the issues at hand (Gadamer, 1975; Huff & Furchert, 2014, 2016) and to avoid the pitfalls and dead ends associated with the fragmentation and isolation of the field.
I.1 A Very Brief History of Moral Psychology
Some of the earliest empirical work in moral psychology was an attempt in the 1920s to understand how moral character dispositions, such as honesty, influenced moral action (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Hartshorne, May, & Maller, 1929; Hartshorne, May, & Shuttleworth, 1930). What emerged from this early work was a conviction that there was very little consistency. This search for consistency in moral behavior remains an issue that troubles moral psychology today. These findings discouraged further work on character for a while, and moral issues became a focus in other sub‐disciplines of psychology. Kurt Lewin, one of the founders of social and organizational psychology and an importer of the German Gestalt tradition, did work on patterns of group organization (authoritarian, democratic, laissez‐faire) that encouraged internal (dis)obedience and aggression (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939). Work by Gordon Allport (1954/1988) established the field of prejudice research. Stanley Milgram’s “shock studies” on obedience to authority made social psychology popular and controversial (Milgram, 1963, 1974). John Darley and colleagues’ work on helping (Darley & Batson, 1973; Latane & Darley, 1970) spawned a still‐lively cottage industry of research in pro‐social behavior (Dovidio, Piliavin, Gaertner, Schroeder, & Clark, 1991; Dovidio, Piliavin, Schroeder, & Penner, 2006; Everett, Haque, & Rand, 2016; Habashi, Graziano, & Hoover, 2016; Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, & Schroeder, 2004). All these areas of research (and others we have not named) were in part motivated by their connection to morality. Some (e.g. Milgram, Darley) have been more thoroughly integrated into current research in moral psychology than others (e.g. Allport, Lewin).
But it was Lawrence Kohlberg’s groundbreaking work that constructed the first psychological home for moral psychology.2 In the introduction to his dissertation Kohlberg (1958, pp. 1–3) signals his intent to challenge the reigning psychological approaches to moral development. He viewed them as relativistic, dangerously reducing moral judgment to simple cultural socialization. This socialization approach did not, in his eyes, recognize the special claim that judgments in the moral realm have – that they are about what is good and right, and that one can transcend and rationally critique one’s culture’s judgments. His concentration on the conscious act of moral judgment, and his grounding in both mainstream developmental psychology and philosophy produced a widely influential research program and tradition that had great empirical, theoretical, and applied success. It was so successful that moral psychology became a wholly owned subsidiary of developmental psychology. Social and personality psychology research was not easy to incorporate into this scheme, partly because from within the Kohlbergian paradigm of conscious, independent judgment it appeared to represent rejected forms of influence, or bias (e.g. situational factors, personality characteristics, conformity).
It was not until the collapse of the Kohlberg paradigm in the 1980s that social and personality psychology work became part of the mainstream in moral psychology again. The paradigm collapsed in part because of the consistently small correlations of moral reasoning ability with actual moral behavior.3 It was replaced with a wide range of theoretical and empirical contenders and approaches: neuroscientific, evolutionary, personality, situational influence, emotion, culture, cognitive, and others. Many of these research programs have recently begun to establish interdisciplinary collaborations with philosophy, anthropology, etc.
This flowering of different approaches is both an opportunity and an obstacle for a coherent psychology of moral action. Some researchers have claimed a “new synthesis” for this body of work (Haidt, 2007). However, for many others the jury is still out, with Frimer and Walker (2008, p. 335) claiming that moral psychology is still “pre‐paradigmatic.” Sinnott‐Armstrong (2016) has argued that it might be impossible to assemble a single theory to unite the field (see also Greene, 2014, 2015). Ellemers, van der Toorn, Paunov, and van Leeuwen (2019) conclude their extensive review of the field by claiming that it is “unbalanced, neglect[s] some key features of human morality … and [is] not well integrated.”4 Our goal in this text is not to provide a theoretical synthesis or integration – it is instead to present an explanatory, hermeneutic framework that can gather these various and partially overlapping literatures into one place where they can better inform each other.
I.2 A Fragmented Field
Moral psychology is indeed a fragmented field. To begin with, it is actually two fields: one in psychology and one in philosophy. Further, in both disciplines, there are numerous relatively isolated cottage industries of research that ignore not only the other discipline but also other literatures within their own discipline. Within these industries, the different approaches tend to be framed as adversarial and exclusive, rather than integrative (D. I. Walker & Thoma, 2017). The intense focus of these areas is often excused by the wholly true claim that a narrow focus allows them to make excellent progress. However, the doubtful claim that the narrow focus is centered on some kernel that is really representative of all morality is often implied. Superficial claims of what the specialized research tells us about “morality” restrict our view of morality to some smaller aspect of it: judgment, intuition, virtue, etc. In this way, the wide breadth of phenomena we are tempted to call moral action is implicitly reduced to some more easily studied topic. It is as though we wanted a necklace but have instead constructed a scattered and incomplete collection of pearls. There is tremendous productivity of research but no narrative thread that ties it all together. Ours is a first attempt to collect the pearls and to offer a string, or at least to frame the parameters for what such a string would look like.
A second difficulty with the field of moral psychology is its isolation from any study of real moral action. Much work in moral psychology (both psychological and philosophical) has been on the research/theory side, and shied away from actual application. This tension has been there from the beginning, as exhibited in the two earlier quotes from the founder of applied psychology, Kurt Lewin. The tension is more clearly revealed in the name for a research method Lewin pioneered, “action research” – a combination of social action and research on its effects (Adelman, 1993). We are used to thinking of research and theory as abstract knowledge and to relegating those who practice in some applied field (medicine, technology, law) to the duties of “applying” that theory. However, action research erases or at least elides this distinction, in favor of learning while doing. This is in part because Lewin thought that both theory and practical action were important and enhanced one another. This is another reason this text offers a focus on moral action – as a corrective to a field full of data and theory about “morality” in general, with only the occasional glimpse of, or reference to, particular individuals taking moral action in their daily lives.
As the philosopher Gadamer has argued, one cannot so easily split the theoretical and the practical. Gadamer (1996) shows that, in the field of medicine, the work that doctors, nurses, and other professionals do in their normal caseload includes kinds of knowledge and expertise that are not at all referenced in the official theory – and that simple application of theory to the concrete case is not the rule‐bound exercise it is often taken to be. In fact, action in the concrete case and knowledge of theory form a “hermeneutical circle” that is required to understand the whole (Gadamer, 1975; Malpas, 2018). Here, the practitioner is confronted with the problem that appropriate application requires intimate knowledge of the theory; but in order to be useful, theoretical knowledge requires intense engagement within the context of application. Gadamer’s conclusion was that theory and experience, general knowledge and intimate understanding, statistical averages and the unique case were inextricably intertwined. Neither could be complete without the other: real knowledge requires experiential immersion; theory informs practice and practice informs theory.
Thus, given what we have called the application problem inherent in all applied fields,5 a central claim of this book emerges: We need a robust experimental and theoretical moral psychology that is connected to and informed by the wide variety of moral action we find in the world. For this reason, we begin our text with seven historical stories of moral action and end it with three humanistic/experiential traditions of moral formation. The traditions are presented in Chapter 9, where they help us toward a more integrated perspective. We introduce the stories here to help us map the landscape of “taking moral action.”
Each chapter will end with one of the stories and ask both how the case might inform our research and how the research and theory might help to understand the case. As we examine contexts, influences, and processes, the cases will focus our attention on moral action, and help to provide a corrective in a field that is heavily experimental and theoretical. Each chapter will also highlight the applied literature that is often lost in the scuffle of abstract theory. Properly chosen, the cases will help to emphasize the wide variety of things that count as moral action in various of settings. This will in turn challenge us to better understand the underlying contexts, influences, and processes that might connect these disparate examples, and encourage us to search for even more variety in the field. Thus, a hermeneutical circle of understanding is constructed, with the goal of better theory and better application.
After introducing the stories, we wrestle with defining the field and eventually abstain in principle from any definition. We then introduce some underlying tensions in moral psychology that each chapter in the book will need to navigate. Finally, we introduce the themes and chapter structure.
I.3 Stories of Moral Action
Nathaniel Borenstein is a well‐known computer scientist who was and remains a deeply committed pacifist. Despite this moral commitment, in 1987 he found himself in a consulting role for a NATO working group on the design of “embedded training systems” for, among other things, tactical nuclear missile launchers. A training system is “embedded” when it runs on a system that is used in the real world, but it can also run in simulation mode without actually triggering any real‐world consequences, such as mistakenly launching a nuclear missile. Nathaniel only reluctantly accepted a consulting relationship with NATO when he became aware that embedding training systems in certain applications was an “extremely dangerous idea” (Borenstein,
1989
) because it might result in accidental missile launches. To his great surprise, he found the military members of the working group to be very interested in his critique, which led to significant changes in recommendations for the design of training systems. Still some of the academic and industry consultants were unpersuaded, since they depended on the approach for funding for research and development.
Rick Munson was “running fast” in his real estate business when he and his wife decided to take in some foster children.
6
The couple ended up founding a charitable organization and a facility that provided integrated services to physically challenged children. Rick had been raised in the Southwest of the United States in a very religious household, where his mother was a social worker and his father a minister. He and his wife were regular churchgoers. After several engagements with the foster child agency, they were asked to take in two children with physical handicaps. The difficulties associated with finding care for them led the couple into increasing commitments: volunteering at schools, serving on boards of charitable organizations, etc. Their initial commitment, and its extension to the wider community, not only transformed the lives of their foster children but eventually touched a much larger group of people. The Munsons’ “involvement in community service does not seem to be a direct result of … religious faith,” the study concluded (Hart, Atkins, & Southerland,
2006
, p. 590). Instead it seems driven more by their initial empathy for the children they fostered. Religion, however, does seem to play a role in coloring and shaping the language the couple use to describe it.
During the 1976–1983 dictatorship in Argentina, Anna’s
7
husband, two brothers, and pregnant sister‐in‐law were all disappeared by the regime.
8
Though Anna had sole responsibility for two young sons, she and her mother began researching answers to the disappearances of their family members. They both joined in the early marches of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo that eventually brought worldwide attention to the brutality of the Argentinian regime and the courageous resistance of the Mothers of the Plaza. Anna also joined in the attempt to document the extent of the disappearances, and later joined a separate organization, the Grandmothers of the Plaza.
9
This group still today uses popular campaigns and genetic testing to search for those children who were kidnapped. Their website speaks of the struggles motivated initially by the search for family members, but it also appeals to universal human rights in its outreach to others. As of 2019 (K. Thalhammer, personal communication, September 6, 2019), Anna was still searching for a missing niece who was born in captivity and thought to have been adopted by a family supportive of the military junta.
In a bar in Boulder Colorado, a man wearing a yarmulke (a skull cap worn by orthodox Jewish men) was attacked by two men (Beitsch, July 20, 2016). Oddly, one of the attackers was visiting the bar with a Jewish friend. When he was charged with a hate crime, he did not understand why. Boulder has a local program of “restorative justice” (Braithwaite,
2002
,
2014
) in which, after preparatory meetings for both sides, offenders sit down with victims and other relevant parties (in this case, the bar owner) to tell their stories and come to an agreement on how the offender can repair the harm. The agreement is often overseen by a justice official, such as a probation officer. In this case, the victim was able to say to his attacker “What if I didn’t have a yarmulke on? Would you still have assaulted me?” This brought a moment of clarity to the discussion and to the offender. As a result, the victim made it clear that he did not want the harshest sentence to be given. The judge in the case allowed the offender to serve his sentence in stages so that he could keep his job. The bar owner confessed his concern that the bar had an unsavory reputation for fights and the other assailant in the case promised to design a mural about inclusion for the bar. As in any criminal case, the motives of the defendants are colored by self‐interest in avoiding punishment, but one aspect of restorative justice is helping to shape additional motivations that might lead to better outcomes.
Thomas Merton, born in France to an Anglican father and Quaker mother, became, by the end of his life, one of the most widely read modern Catholic authors. He was also an influential advocate for interreligious dialogue and for nonviolent struggle and human rights in America. For this latter aspect of his work, he was criticized by many for political writings “unbecoming of a monk” (Thomas Merton Center, n.d.). One can, for example, find scathing critiques of racism and “white civilization” in his
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
(Merton,
1966
) or his
Letters to a White Liberal
(Merton,
1964
). Merton’s radical political stance was an integral outgrowth of his spirituality, of his singular desire to re‐form the self in search of a relationship with God (Kilcourse,
1996
). At least in biographical terms, the search for God came first: “All I knew was that I wanted grace, and that I needed prayer, and that I was helpless without God” (Merton,
1948/1998
, p. 329). Merton’s response to the turbulent decades of the civil rights movement might have been further isolation in the monastery. But a complex web of motivations and opportunities led him instead to the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1960s where he became one of the most widely read Catholic authors of the century.
After it became clear in November of 2020 that Joe Biden had won the US presidential election, then‐President Donald Trump engaged on a long campaign to invalidate the results and remain in office. Two relatively obscure figures became the early public faces of the resistance. Aaron Van Langevelde was one of two Republicans on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers whose job it was to certify that the votes in the election had been correctly tallied. He was under intense pressure from high‐ranking party members to vote no, abstain, or resign. He voted yes because the cost of not doing so would be “constitutional chaos and the loss of our integrity” (Bidgood,
2021
). Brad Raffensperger was the Secretary of State in Georgia. He received a long phone call from then‐President Trump in which Trump both threatened Raffensperger with federal investigation and asked him to “find” 11,780 votes, just enough to throw the state’s result to him. Raffensperger’s reply on the phone was “We believe that we do have an accurate election” (Gardner & Firozi,
2021
). In a subsequent book (Raffensperger,
2021
), he explained his motivation as choosing “integrity and truth” vs. “what is expedient.”
In the Fall of 2021, US House Representative Elizabeth Cheney (Wyoming) sacrificed her high‐ranking position in the Republican Party to co‐chair the investigation into the January 6 attack on the US Congress. She had previously won her party’s endorsement to Congress with 73% of the vote and she “knew she could easily have done the same again” if she simply went along with her party’s widely accepted (or at least not rejected) narrative of a stolen election. “That was a path I could not and would not take,” she said in her concession speech, insisting that she had a higher loyalty to “the principles that we are all sworn to protect” (Fung, 2022).
Sophie Scholl has become the icon of stories of German resistance against the Nazi regime, in no small part because of her elder sister’s publication of a book about the White Rose movement in which Sophie and her brother Hans were central actors (Beuys,
2012
). Her parents were, from the beginning, suspicious of the National Socialist (Nazi) movement, but the five Scholl children were enthusiastic supporters. Sophie, who had joined the League of German Girls (a branch of Hitler Youth) in 1934 did not give up her membership until 1938, and still attended “home meetings” as late as Spring 1941. Sophie’s published correspondence with Fritz Hartnagel (Hartnagel,
2005
), an officer in the German army, documents her struggle to clarify her attitude toward her country and the National Socialist movement. When Hans founded the White Rose resistance movement at the University of Munich in the summer of 1942, Sophie, recently enrolled at the university, was aware and supportive of the effort. Later she was an active author of the fifth and sixth leaflets the movement produced and distributed. These were addressed to “the intellectuals” of Europe calling them to reject the regime, and they eventually found their way to Great Britain, where they were reprinted and dropped over Germany by plane. In February 1943, Sophie and Hans were leaving leaflets in stacks in the main building of the university. When she noticed there were a few left in their satchel, Sophie dug them out and tossed them over the railing of the hallway into the main atrium of the building. A janitor confronted them and turned them in to university officials, who had them arrested. After interrogation and a very short trial, they were both executed by the Nazis in private (Beuys,
2012
).
All seven of these very different historical examples involve taking moral action. Some involve directly helping others, some involve working to change systems, to build community, or to advise, educate, or support others. Some, like the Munsons or Sophie Scholl, begin with small commitments that slowly balloon into larger ones, sometimes much larger. Other examples, like Nathaniel Borenstein or Thomas Merton, involve commitments to one goal that transform themselves into other related commitments. Many stories come with a turning point, a change of heart, a break with formerly held beliefs in pursuit of a greater good. Some take place in contexts of moral conflicts where one’s moral action conflicts with someone else’s conviction of the right (e.g. Sophie and Hans Scholl vs. the janitor, Cheney vs. her party). Others, like the Munsons, are a deepening of commitments to a widely recognized good.
What are the goals, desires, obligations, plans, hopes, or values that motivate the very different moral actors and actions presented in these stories? What aspects of their personality, situation, and abilities help to structure their action? These are the questions that drive this book, along with a recognition of the wide variety of human action that we are tempted to call moral (or to reject as immoral). These examples actually represent six different, and mostly disconnected, literatures in applied psychology and social science:
Nathaniel Borenstein’s story is representative of research on virtuous action in various professions. These professions include computing and engineering (Huff & Furchert,
2014
; Huff & Martin,
1995
; Pritchard,
1998
,
2001
), dentistry (Bebeau,
1994
), journalism and public relations (Plaisance,
2014a
,
2014b
), and law (Hamilton & Monson,
2012
). Much of this work was inspired by early research on “moral exemplars” in the contexts of the Holocaust (Oliner & Oliner,
1988
) and of social service in America (Colby & Damon,
1992
) and it was based in part on theological and philosophical virtue models of moral action.
The Munsons’ story is drawn from a large literature in volunteerism (Stukas, Snyder, & Clary,
2016
) that looks at why people volunteer in various contexts (Atkins, Hart, & Donnelly,
2005
; Snyder & Omoto,
2008
; Stukas et al.,
2016
) and how that experience of helping others shapes their self‐concept, moral development, and future moral action (Grube & Piliavin,
2000
; Hart et al.,
2006
; Hart & Matsuba,
2007
; Snyder & Clary,
2004
).
The Mothers of the Plaza and Sophie Scholl are both examples of what has been called “courageous resistance” (Thalhammer,
2001
): a much more high‐stakes volunteerism in which people often risk their own welfare and lives to resist actions and policies of government. Much progress has been made in constructing psychological and sociological models of how this highly risky form of moral action is nourished, motivated, and organized (Comer & Sekerka,
2018
; Thalhammer et al.,
2007
).
The restorative justice story from Boulder gives us some insight into how people might move from being below acceptable standards of behavior to becoming valued members of the community. Recent movements in restorative justice have begun to focus attention on the psychological processes by which criminal offenders move from what are called “criminogenic beliefs” that excuse their offenses to a more objective understanding of how society views them (Braithwaite,
1989
,
2002
,
2014
,
2016
; N. Harris,
2006
; Tangney, Mashek, & Stuewig,
2007
). The transformation of the moral emotions such as shame and guilt has been highlighted as a central process in this rehabilitative change (Stuewig, Tangney, Heigel, Harty, & McCloskey,
2010
; Stuewig, Tangney, Mashek, Forkner, & Dearing,
2009
; Tangney, Mashek, et al.,
2007
; Tangney, Stuewig, & Hafez,
2011
; Tangney, Stuewig, & Martinez,
2014
; Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek,
2007
). How we think about guilt, blame, and moral becoming may undermine or support this rehabilitative purpose (Darley,
2001
; Darley, Carlsmith, & Robinson,
2000
; Gill & Cerce,
2017
; Gill & Getty,
2016
).
The story of Thomas Merton is one being drawn by “ultimate verities” (Luhrmann & Weisman,
2022
; Maslow,
1969
) that naturally developed to include moral commitments. One of the serendipitous findings of the classic work in moral exemplars (Colby & Damon,
1992
) was that even though the selection criteria did not include reference to religion, almost all of the exemplars saw their moral commitments as outgrowths of, and supported by, their religious commitments.
10
Citing this finding, Walker and Frimer (
2008
) begin their article on “Transcendence in the lives of moral heroes” with the claim “Moral psychology suffers from a grievous blind spot” and go on to detail the complex and difficult relationship of transcendence and morality. They argue, as we do in this book, that there are multiple paths to mature moral functioning and many include religion. Religion’s relationship with morality is fraught and paradoxical, promoting both moral and immoral action (Bloom,
2012
; DeWall et al.,
2010
; Ginges, Hansen, & Norenzayan,
2009
; Graham & Haidt,
2010
,
2012
; Koole, McCullough, Kuhl, & Roelofsma,
2010
; Ysseldyk, Matheson, & Anisman,
2010
). As we will discover in
Chapter 9
, this may not be an effect of religion per se, but more a reflection of the moral collapse (Hart,
2005
) that can happen when a relative value becomes falsely sacralized (Graham & Haidt,
2012
) or is taken as being of ultimate value itself (Furchert,
2022
). The pull of the ultimate plays a crucial role in all the narratives. Abraham Maslow’s often neglected final stage in the hierarchy of needs is that of self‐transcendence in service of a goal higher than the self (Koltko‐Rivera,
2006
). These goals can be religiously inspired but also moral, artistic, social, or intellectual. All share a motivational pull of “ultimate verities” such as “truth, goodness, beauty, perfection, excellence, simplicity, elegance” (Maslow,
1969
, p. 4). In this vein, we might also include exemplars like Emily Dickinson, who surely was motivated by devotion to the art of poetry to “explore the full range of human experience” and whose belief was “nimble” rather than religious (Lundin,
2004
, p. 4).
The stories of Van Langvelde, Raffensperger, and Cheney seem at first glance to be the clearest example of people acting on principle to “do the right thing,” but there is much complexity hiding behind them. They are clearly all referring to standards of conduct that prescribe and proscribe certain actions (C. E. Harris,
2008
; Janoff‐Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp,
2009
). Van Langvelde and Raffensperger, however, also refer to their roles as being “public servants” who should administer their duties without partisanship. Cheney speaks of duties to higher principles than party loyalty (Karl,
2022
). This suggests that at least their professional identities (Bebeau & Monson,
2012
; Bebeau & Thoma,
2012
) were part of what was at stake in their decisions. And the inclusion of “constitutional chaos” in Van Langvelde’s comments suggest some calculation of the costs for his party, the government, and the people. There is a long literature of how various motivations are traded off in ethical decision‐making (Fleischmann, Lammers, Conway, & Galinsky,
2017
; Gamez‐Djokic & Molden,
2016
; Shenhav & Greene,
2014
). The approach that seems most fitting here is Hirschman’s (
1970
) exit, voice, loyalty decision tree and the various influences that lead to each decision (or lack of decision that amounts to choice). The intense pressure on them all has been regularly attributed to tribalism in politics (Clark, Liu, Winegard, & Ditto,
2019
) and its emphasis on loyalty (Frimer, Gaucher, & Schaefer,
2014
). The complexities of multiple loyalties, and their interactions with group identity and moral principle, make loyalty a “double‐edged sword” (Berry, Lewis, & Sowden,
2021
) that can result in moral or immoral behavior depending on the actor’s judgment of “what does a situation like this mean for a person like me?” (Weber, Kopelman, & Messick,
2004
). Thus, even in what seems like a clear case of principled action, there is much complexity to be discovered.
Though anecdotal and incomplete these examples and accompanying literatures hint at the range and depth of moral action that this book tries to investigate. Moral action pervades life across cultures and has been central to human culture since we first began keeping records.11 Moral traits are central to our sense of self and identity (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014) and people report being willing to go to great lengths to protect their moral reputation (Vonash, Reynolds, Winegard, & Baumeister, 2017). Moral dissimilarity produces a desire to distance ourselves from others, intolerance of those others, and an inability to design solutions to resolve disagreements (Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis, 2005). And moral contagion drives much of what becomes “viral” on the internet (Brady, Crockett, & Van Bavel, 2020).
The seven examples we provide of real‐world, applied moral action give some idea of the variation in things we include under the description of moral action, the wide range of domains in which moral commitments matter, and the variation in commitments that one can find in those who regularly take moral action. We will return to them throughout this book. Examples of other areas and dimensions of variation of moral action will accumulate as we read through the text.
I.4 Considering the Scope of Moral Action
Psychological moral psychology,12 the field this book attempts to introduce and to organize, is one of the most vibrant and active areas of research in psychology today (Ellemers et al., 2019; Greene, 2015; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Huff & Gaasedelen, 2011). In addition to generating a great deal of research, it also plays a central role in psychology, touching almost every subfield. We provide here an introductory overview of the breath of the field without claiming it to be exhaustive.
With an inclusive approach, we hope to produce and support an interdisciplinary conversation by providing doors to the wide range of psychological research in moral psychology and by suggesting some narratives upon which those doors might open (Heiphetz & Cushman, 2021). Two philosophers who deal in moral psychology have written, “in science there is seldom, or never, a single decisive experiment or, for that matter, a decisive experimental failure. General conclusions about social science can legitimately be drawn only from encountering, in full detail, a body of research, and adducing patterns or trends” (Doris & Stich, 2005, p. 123).13 We hope that by adducing patterns in psychology we can also point out doors that open upon both philosophy and theology. Thoughtful readers will be able to make connections to fields even further removed.
I.4.1 Exploration Instead of Definition
To capture moral action in all its variety, we must resist drawing narrow definitional lines that would exclude morally interesting phenomena. To be perfectly clear, we reject the idea that it is useful to restrict moral psychology to any singular definition of morality, and instead encourage opening up the scope of “the moral” to all the interesting places one might find it. Thus, we open the focus of the text to the production and maintenance of moral action (rather than concentrating, e.g. on moral judgment or intuition14). We include making judgments but also the experience of moral emotion, and the practice of sharpening those emotions. We include the influence of organizations on moral action and the influence of moral action on organizations. At the concrete level represented by the stories with which we began, we want to include taking action to change social systems, regularly caring for a foster child, writing guidelines for military weapons systems to make them safer, seeking an authentic relationship with one’s spouse or with God, a singular devotion to plumbing the human soul through poetry, trying to become a law‐abiding citizen or make restitution for a crime, looking for your stolen grandchild, being loyal or disobedient, and a host of other interesting and even contrary things people do that one might consider at least in part morally motivated.15
How does our scope differ from others that researchers in the area have used? The Selective Table of Definitions of Moral Psychology at the end of this chapter provides sixteen different definitions of morality that have been used in the field. Many are still in circulation. Some come from the same theorist whose ideas have changed over time or context (e.g. Haidt, Kohlberg, Narvaez). One might find that both a quick read of this table and longer study of additional definitions will reveal there is no theoretical unity in definition or area of focus. For this reason, we have included a column that gives some idea of the purpose for which each definition was crafted.
Some of these definitions of morality are quite restrictive (e.g. 1 and 9, focusing on judgment), while others are quite open. For the purpose of this text, our preference is to embrace some synthesis of the most expansive ones (e.g. 4, 10, and 14) and simultaneously to reject imposing definitional restrictions. This allows us to search widely for interesting moral phenomena.
We liken our broad approach to that of nineteenth‐century natural history. Historians of philosophy have called this approach Humboldtian Science in a reference to the great German scientific explorer, Alexander von Humboldt (Cannon, 1978; Dettelbach, 2001). Charles Darwin was inspired by Humboldt’s scientific travels, took Humboldt’s works on his famous voyage on the Beagle, and modeled some of his writings after Humboldt (van Wyhe, 2002
