Abstract
Moral Psychology, the study of the biologically evolved nature of human thinking with regard to matters of ethics, has interesting applications in the traditional study of moral philosophy. Some of these applications and implications are explored—relating to violence, sexual choice, and the protection of the group that supplies individual identity.
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Notes
- 1.
The term, and its specification, are taken from Robert Wright, The Moral Animal; Why We Are the Way We Are—The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, New York: Random House, 1994. This work is the general source for the rest of this section.
- 2.
The classic work in the field is E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. The book aroused so much controversy that the term practically disappeared from the language in the years that followed.
- 3.
The passage is concerned with “alarm-bell emotions,” emotional reactions that reject some object or action as morally unacceptable or disgusting (like eating feces); these emotions have been identified with “the amygdala, which has been implicated in responses to personal moral dilemmas, [and which] reliably responds to threatening visual stimuli such as snakes and faces of outgroup members.” John Doris, ed., The Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 62; in Chap. 2, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Joshua D. Greene, “Multi-System Moral Psychology.” These authors in turn cite Le Doux, 1996 [Le Doux, J., The Emotional Brain, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996] 166; and Phelps et al., 2000 [Phelps, E.A., O’Connor, K.J., Cunningham, W.A., Funayama, E.S., Gatenby, J.C., Gore, J.C., et al. “Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(5):729–738 (2000)].
- 4.
We will not review the empirical studies on this point, certainly not in any quantitative treatment, as beyond the primary scope of this work. They are all available in recent scientific literature; check out the sources in the Bibliography for this chapter.
- 5.
There is a particularly good source for this conclusion: Jonathan Haidt, “The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment,” Psychological Review, Vol 108(4), Oct 2001, 814–834.
- 6.
This statement is from Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew congregations of the Commonwealth and a member of the House of Lords, in a NY Times Op-Ed, “The Moral Animal,” Monday, December 24, 2012. The writer goes on to say, “We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals.”
- 7.
Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blaxkwell, 1978; originally appeared in Oxford Review, #5, 1967. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” 59 The Monist 204–217 (1976); “The Trolley Problem,” 94 Yale Law Journal 1395–1415 (1985).
- 8.
The Trolley Problem, and this speculation to explain it, have unfortunately become almost accepted in the field, and are mentioned in several articles in Doris, The Moral Psychology Handbook, op.cit., occasionally including diagrams of trolley tracks, showing where the crews are standing. See Gilbert Harman, Kelby Mason, & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Reasoning,” p. 206ff, esp pp. 223–225; the DDE, as they call it, also shows up in Erica Roedder and Gilbert Harman, “Linguistics and Moral Theory,” pp. 286–287, described there as a “non-obvious” moral rule. It certainly is that.
- 9.
Cushman, Young and Greene, op.cit. pp. 62, 63.
- 10.
William H. Gass, “The Case of the Obliging Stranger,” Philosophical Review 66 (1957) 193–204.
- 11.
But appropriate institutions have been imagined. See Sheri Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country, Victor Gollancz Ltd 2013 (1988).
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Newton, L. (2013). Some Considerations from Moral Psychology. In: Ethical Decision Making: Introduction to Cases and Concepts in Ethics. SpringerBriefs in Ethics. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00167-8_4
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