Moral Psychology - History

History

Historically, early philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato engaged in both empirical research and a priori conceptual analysis about the ways in which people make decisions about issues that raise moral concerns. Moral psychological issues have been central theoretical issues explored by philosophers from the early days of the profession right up until the present. With the development of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy, it was natural for psychologists to continue pursuing work in moral psychology, and much of the empirical research of the 20th century in this area was completed by academics working in psychology departments.

Today moral psychology is a thriving area of research in both philosophy and psychology, even at an interdisciplinary level. For example, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg questioned boys and young men about their thought processes when they were faced with a moral dilemma, producing one of many very useful empirical studies in the area of moral psychology. As another example, the philosopher Joshua Knobe recently completed an empirical study on how the way in which an ethical problem is phrased dramatically affects an individual's intuitions about the proper moral response to the problem. More conceptually focused research has been completed by researchers such as John Doris. Doris (2002) discusses the way in which social psychological experiments---such as the Stanford Prison Experiments involving the idea of situationism---call into question a key component in virtue ethics: the idea that individuals have a single, environment-independent moral character. As a further example, Shaun Nichols (2004) examines how empirical data on psychopathology suggests that moral rationalism is false.