135 - Moral psychology

Summary

Moral psychology aims at understanding the moral experience of persons – moral feelings, attitudes, and sentiments – and the patterns of moral deliberation, judgment, and motivation with which they are associated. And it aims at understanding this experience, a normal part of human life, as distinctively moral and not simply as general psychological experience or as neural activity in the brain. A person’s psychological experience is distinctively moral when it cannot be identified or explained without reference to moral concepts, principles or values. So, for example, a person’s experience of guilt is distinctively moral because the feeling of guilt can be neither identified nor explained as guilt without appeal to principles of right and notions of wrongdoing. On the other hand, a person’s experience of fear is not distinctively moral because the feeling of fear can often be identified and explained without appeals to moral concepts, principles, or values. Finally, it is primarily for the sake of addressing particular issues within moral and political philosophy, not natural or social sciences, that moral psychology aims at understanding the moral experience of persons as distinctively moral.