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12 - Moral Habit

from Part II - The Enactment of Habits in Mind and World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Mark Johnson
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

As John Dewey observed, and contemporary moral psychology confirms, most of our moral deliberation and judgment operates via deeply rooted habits of perception, discrimination, and valuing over which we have little conscious control. These processes are intuitive, automatic, and seldom subject to reflective change. However, we are not just condemned to our reinforced biases, because we are also creatures whose brains exhibit a measure of plasticity, or what Dewey called “habits of flexibility.” Good moral deliberation, therefore, is intelligent reconstruction of habits, and the formation of new habits that make it possible for us to deal constructively with new moral problems that confront us. Moral deliberation of this sort is a process of dramatic imaginative rehearsal of possibilities for conscientiously transforming our habits, in order to deal with the new problems that arise from changed conditions. Conscientiousness is a flexible habit of reflective, empathic, and critical moral inquiry.

Keywords

moral habitvaluationmoral deliberationimaginative rehearsalconscientiousness
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 264 - 276
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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