Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide

169 Pages·2017·2.38 MB·English

by  Benjamin G. Voyer

Benjamin G. Voyer
Tor Tarantola Editors
Moral
Psychology
A Multidisciplinary Guide
Moral Psychology
Benjamin G. Voyer • Tor Tarantola
Editors
Moral Psychology
A Multidisciplinary Guide
Editors
Benjamin G. Voyer Tor Tarantola
Department of Marketing Department of Psychology
ESCP Europe University of Cambridge
London, UK Cambridge, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-61847-0 ISBN 978-3-319-61849-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61849-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953195
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
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Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank Bradley Franks, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, and
members of the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at the
London School of Economics and Political Science. Thank you to our parents.
v
Contents
Toward a Multidisciplinary Moral Psychology ........................................... 1
Benjamin G. Voyer and Tor Tarantola
Between Facts and Norms: Ethics and Empirical
Moral Psychology ........................................................................................... 5
Hanno Sauer
An Evolutionarily Informed Study of Moral Psychology ........................... 29
Max M. Krasnow
Moral Psychology: An Anthropological Perspective .................................. 43
Paolo Heywood
Cognitive and Neural Sciences: Investigating
the Moral System ........................................................................................... 59
Tor Tarantola
(Im)Morality in Political Discourse?: The Effects
of Moral Psychology in Politics ..................................................................... 81
Nicholas P. Nicoletti and William K. Delehanty
An Open Letter to Our Students: Doing Interdisciplinary
Moral Psychology ........................................................................................... 119
Edouard Machery and John M. Doris
Current Perspectives in Moral Psychology .................................................. 143
Frans de Waal, Hanno Sauer, Paolo Heywood, Verena Wieser,
Edouard Machery, and John M. Doris
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
vii
Contributors
William K. Delehanty Department of Social Sciences, Missouri Southern State
University (MSSU), Joplin, MO, USA
John  M.  Doris Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program & Philosophy
Department, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
Paolo  Heywood Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK
Max M. Krasnow Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory, Department of Psychology,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Edouard Machery Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Nicholas P. Nicoletti Department of Social Sciences, Missouri Southern State
University (MSSU), Joplin, MO, USA
Hanno Sauer Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University,
Utrecht, The Netherlands
Tor Tarantola Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge,
UK
Benjamin G. Voyer Department of Marketing, ESCP Europe, London, UK
Frans de Waal Living Links Center, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
Verena Wieser Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism,
University of Innsbruck School of Management, Innsbruck, Austria
ix
About the Authors
Benjamin G. Voyer is a behavioural scientist and interdisciplinary researcher,
working with both quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate how
self-perception and interpersonal relations affect cognition and behaviour in various
contexts (consumption, organisational, cross-cultural, etc.). He has authored or co-
authored more than 150 scientific contributions to the field of applied psychology
(journal articles, conference presentations, case studies, etc.). He is currently L’Oréal
Professor of Creativity & Marketing at ESCP Europe Business School and Visiting
Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the UK.
Tor Tarantola completed his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Cambridge
and is currently a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. His research focuses on rein-
forcement learning, social cognition, and their implications for legal theory and
practice. He was formerly a fiscal and policy analyst at the non-partisan Legislative
Analyst’s Office in California, where he helped advise state lawmakers on criminal
justice policy.
xi
Toward a Multidisciplinary Moral Psychology
Benjamin G. Voyer and Tor Tarantola
Humans idolize, condemn, suffer, rejoice, kill, and die in the name of morality. We
are a hypersocial species—nearly everything we do involves other people. So it’s
not surprising that the rules governing our interactions—what we owe to one another
and how we ought to treat transgressors—occupy a prime spot in the human psyche.
Moral psychology tries to understand how these rules come about, how we perceive
and act on them, and how we respond when people violate them.
Despite its name, moral psychology spans every discipline concerned with
human interaction—from philosophy and sociology to evolutionary biology and
neuroscience. The applications of this research have been significant, helping us
better understand the biases of juries, the culpability of minors and the mentally ill,
and the public’s views on the purposes of criminal and civil sanctions. It also has the
potential to guide how governments implement justice policies and to allow us to
better negotiate competing norms across cultures.
As the varied disciplines comprising moral psychology have developed, their
methods have become increasingly specialized and complex. For example, cogni-
tive scientists have used computational modeling to break new ground in under-
standing human interaction, but these methods often elude researchers in less
mathematical fields. Similarly, academic philosophy often uses frameworks and
vocabularies in which scientists are not conversant. As a result, the academy has
become increasingly siloed, meaning that significant advances in one discipline can
go largely unnoticed in others.
B.G. Voyer (*)
Department of Marketing, ESCP Europe, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
T. Tarantola
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 1
B.G. Voyer, T. Tarantola (eds.), Moral Psychology,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61849-4_1
2 B.G. Voyer and T. Tarantola
Our aim in this volume is to help break through the siloes by offering a pan-
oramic view of the trends, methods, and questions that dominate moral psychol-
ogy research in different disciplines. The breadth and complexity of these
questions—within each discipline, let alone across several—preclude us from
being comprehensive. Rather, we hope to offer researchers of different back-
grounds a taste of the diverse perspectives from which these questions are
approached and to show how greater collaboration across disciplines can help
advance the field. We also hope this volume will be useful to practitioners—law-
yers, clinicians, policymakers, and others—whose work centers on the intersec-
tion of moral codes and human behavior.
Philosopher Hanno Sauer begins the volume by tracing the history of moral psy-
chology from David Hume to modern empirical philosophy. For Sauer, the progres-
sion of philosophical thinking about morality and the tensions between empirical
and normative questions—asking “what is” versus asking “what ought to be”—pro-
vide important context for current research. He focuses on what he calls the “gap”
between facts and norms and outlines how key debates in philosophy—about moral
relativism, free will, leading a virtuous life, and others—can be informed by empiri-
cal work.
In the second chapter, evolutionary psychologist Max Krasnow outlines a theory
for how the fundamentals of moral behavior—altruism and punishment—evolved
as biologically beneficial predispositions. He draws a useful distinction between
mechanisms directed at regulating one’s own behavior (what he calls “inward-fac-
ing mechanisms”) and those directed at changing others’ behavior (“outward-facing
mechanisms”). Consideration of each of these types of mechanisms is necessary, he
argues, in order to fully appreciate the evolutionary dynamics that shaped the core
of human morality. His theory shows why the empirical and theoretical study of
morality can be so difficult—because the ultimate reasons behind a moral decision
might often be unknown even to the person who makes it.
In the third chapter, social anthropologist Paolo Heywood offers a critical per-
spective on the traditional approaches to studying ethics and morality in his disci-
pline. He surveys recent theoretical and ethnographic work, presents the framework
for a modern “anthropology of ethics,” and tackles a central question facing anthro-
pologists who study moral psychology: how can moral behavior be both universal
and culturally specific?
In the fourth chapter, cognitive scientist Tor Tarantola surveys the varied research
that has contributed to an emerging cognitive science of morality. He outlines the
major advances at three levels of what he calls the “moral system”—the group level,
which studies how norms emerge and evolve; the interactive level, which studies the
dynamics of interpersonal interactions; and the individual level, which studies the
individual cognitive and neural processes that underlie perceptions and behavior. This
chapter draws on work from varied fields—from sociology, which has generated
important theories about the emergence of norms; to experimental psychology and
behavioral economics, which have begun to quantify the factors important to moral
judgments; to cognitive neuroscience, which investigates how the brain implements
the perceptual and cognitive tasks that underlie moral behaviors and experiences.