Moral relativism, as I understand it, is the claim that there is not a single objectively true morality but only many different moralities, just as there is not a single true language but only many different languages. Different people may have different moralities as reflected in the way they act and the ways they react to the actions of others and there is no objective way to show that one of...

Two studies explored the relationship between political ideology and endorsement of a range of moral principles. Political liberals and conservatives did not differ on intrapersonal or interpersonal moralities, which require self-regulation. However differences emerged on collective moralities, which involve social regulation. Contrary to Moral Foundations Theory, both liberals and conservative...

The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such domain is morality. Could there be universal generative moral grammar? More specifically, might it be useful to moral theory to develop an explicit...

We present a new six-cell Model of Moral Motives that applies a fundamental motivational distinction in psychology to the moral domain. In addition to moral motives focused on the self or another, we propose two group-based moralities, both communal in orientation, but reflecting distinct moral motives (Social Order/Communal Solidarity vs. Social Justice/Communal Responsibility) as well as diff...

The purpose of this chapter is to present a sociocultural perspective on the study of moral development, and to review theoretical and empirical work on moral development that has been conducted under the rubric of this perspective. This perspective has emerged over the course of the last decade or so, in response to a variety of challenges to prevailing theories of moral development—in particu...

S ometimes a finding in a survey, while of limited significance by itself, illuminates the encompassing, even debilitating, deficiency of a broader issue. One such finding has it that young Americans expect to have the right to be tried before a jury of their peers, but are quite reluctant to participate in jury duty. This finding illustrates a more general societal imbalance of people who freq...