Faculty Books and Book Chapters
Morality is Personal
Book Title
Atlas of moral psychology
Document Type
Book Chapter
ISBN
9781462532568
Publication Date
2018
Description
What is the purpose of moral judgment? In the present chapter, we argue that the goal of moral cognition is often not to praise or condemn specific actions but, rather, to try to understand other people’s moral character via their actions. Human beings often act as intuitive virtue ethicists who view behaviors as signals of underlying moral traits such as trustworthiness and compassion. In making this argument, we first briefly review historical approaches to the philosophy and psychology of ethics before introducing our theoretical perspective, which we term person-centered morality. We then explore two lines of empirical evidence supporting our argument that moral judgment is often about evaluating people, not acts: first, character assessments are automatic, yet nuanced, and serve an important functional purpose. Second, character information can outweigh information about objective harm, and judgments of character can often diverge from evaluations of acts. Next, we present evidence that results supporting the person-centered view of morality are highly replicable. To close, we argue that recognizing that human beings have a preoccupation with moral virtues leads to the insight that our moral judgments can be both rational and intuitive, in meaningful senses.
Publisher
The Guilford Press
First Page
121
Last Page
132
NSUWorks Citation
Landy, J. F.,
Uhlmann, E. L.
(2018). Morality is Personal. Atlas of moral psychology, 121-132.
Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facbooks/608