Talents and Interests: A Hegelian Moral Psychology

Moral Relativism and Moral Psychology

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...

Innateness and Moral Psychology

Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporary innateness debates, moral nativism has perhaps an even deeper ancestry. If linguistic nativism is Cartesian, moral nativism is Platonic. Moral nativism has taken a backseat to linguistic nativism in contemporary discussions largely because Chomsky made a case for linguistic nativism characterized by unprecedented ri...

Moral relativism and evolutionary psychology

I argue that evolutionary strategies of kin selection and game-theoretic reciprocity are apt to generate agent-centered and agentneutral moral intuitions, respectively. Such intuitions are the building blocks of moral theories, resulting in a fundamental schism between agent-centered theories on the one hand and agentneutral theories on the other. An agent-neutral moral theory is one according ...

Critiquing empirical moral psychology

Commonsense psychology seems to have it that most morally significant decisions arise through practical reasoning and moral delibaeration. No doubt, there are social psychological data that put pressure on reflective views of human agency. However, even on the assumption that non-rational and irrational processes are implicated in many morally significant decisions (cf., Doris, 2002, forthcomin...