ON THE SUBJECT MATTER OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

Implications of moral psychology for medical education

Moral Psychology

One goal of moral psychologists is to understand the cognitive processes that support and influence human moral judgment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this task has proven to be quite daunting. Moral psychology, as well as moral philosophy and anthropology have revealed great diversity in human moral judgment. Moral philosophers have debated ethics for centuries, yet to this day display a wide diver...

Moral Relativism and Moral Psychology

The Psychology of Moral Conviction

This paper reviews current theory and research that indicates that attitudes held with strong moral conviction (‘moral mandates’) represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., attitude strength, partisanship, or religiosity), and that variance in moral conviction has important social and political consequences, such as increased intolerance of attitudinally dissimila...

The psychology of moral reasoning

This article presents a theory of reasoning about moral propositions that is based on four fundamental principles. First, no simple criterion picks out propositions about morality from within the larger set of deontic propositions concerning what is permissible and impermissible in social relations, the law, games, and manners. Second, the mechanisms underlying emotions and deontic evaluations ...