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Introduction

Humans have ethical abilities--abilities to act in accordance with ethical considerations, to make ethical judgements, to exercise moral suasion, and to feel things in response to unethical or superordinate acts. Moral psychology is the study of the psychological aspects of these ethical abilities. The questions for this course are: What ethical abilities do humans have? What states and processes underpin them? What, if anything, do discoveries about ethical abilities imply for political conflict, and what do they imply about ethics?

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Notes

Moral psychology is the study of psychological aspects of ethical abilities (Doris, Stich, Phillips, & Walmsley, 2017).[1]

The Overall Questions for this course are:

  • What ethical abilities do humans have? What states and processes underpin them?
  • What, if anything, do discoveries about ethical abilities imply for political conflict, and what do they imply about ethics?

References

Doris, J., Stich, S., Phillips, J., & Walmsley, L. (2017). Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Kelly, D. (2022). Two Ways to Adopt a Norm: The (Moral?) Psychology of Internalization and Avowal. In M. Vargas & J. M. Doris (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (pp. 285–30). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198871712.013.17
Superson, A. (2014). Feminist Moral Psychology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Endnotes

  1. Note that the term ‘moral psychology’ is sometimes used for a more narrowly philosophical project about what motivates moral actions and ‘what kind of beings we are or ought to be, morally speaking’ (Superson, 2014). That is not the topic of this module. ↩︎