Psychologists and others have long debated the moral consequences of religious identification, religious belief, spirituality, and religious ritual adherence. Many enlightened luminaries have been disquieted by fears of how people might act in a world without the strictures of God and religion. This chapter reviews data on how people around the world see morality and its linkage to religion. The chapter also considers theory and research on why people might want to act morally in the first place. One problem concerns defining just what people mean by moral character, a question explored from various angles. Moral psychology has developed as an important field, but one that frequently treats religious variables as an afterthought. Still, moral psychology is essential to understanding the development of values inside and outside religion and a large section of this chapter reviews relevant research and theory. The chapter also examines empirical studies of the connection between various measures of religiousness and generosity, charity, honesty, lawfulness, sexual propriety, sobriety, racial tolerance, open-mindedness, and other aspects of prosocial behavior.

This chapter argues that while being just is of supreme importance in Epicureanism, obeying the law in all cases is not: the Epicureans allow that laws whose adherence is not useful and whose violation does not entail negative consequences may be violated. In arguing for this claim, the chapter discusses a question that Epicurus posed himself in a work that is no longer extant, namely, whether a sage, an ideal agent, would violate a law, knowing he will escape detection. The chapter provides a detailed suggestion on how to understand Epicurus’ pronouncement, discusses alternative readings that have been advanced by other scholars, and addresses some objections that one could raise against the suggestion of the chapter.

Plutarch the philosopher is present in all his texts. His allegiance is not in doubt: he is a follower of Plato, who is open-minded to other schools, as far as their views are reconcilable with Plato’s. He is above all committed to the dialogical spirit pervading Plato’s works. In several more technical treatises, he develops the core of his philosophical views. These have to do with the composition of the world-soul and its image, the human soul. From there, Plutarch develops his views on moral psychology: it is the task of reason, the divine presence in us, to control the irrational passions. This idea forms the basis of various texts in which the therapy of the soul and the development of character are the central goals. Plutarch’s concept of philosophy and his doctrinal stance are quite different from what we find in later Platonism. Later doxographical reports on Plutarch are not always reliable.

Moral education is an unavoidable aspect of classroom interactions between teachers and students. Every decision teachers make about their educational practice is colored by the moral and cultural environment in which they teach. Not only are contemporary classrooms infused with moral, cultural, and personal values, but contemporary life is rife with moral hazards that urge us to prepare the youth appropriately for their particular challenges. In this introductory chapter, we discuss some of these hazards and outline how the present volume provides various theoretical and conceptual resources for addressing them. In addition, we give an overview of the other important topics discussed in this volume. These topics include neo-Aristotelian, postclassical, neo-Kantian, and care-based ethics and their role in reconceiving the aims and methods of moral education, as well as new perspectives on moral education that have grown out of the capability approach to democratic justice and recognition theory.

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

The chapter reviews the essentials of Seneca’s positions in moral psychology as compared to those of earlier Stoics whose works he might have studied. On the material nature of the mind (or soul); on the mechanisms of thought, belief, and action; and on the nature and management of the emotions, Seneca’s views are consonant with those of his Stoic predecessors; however, his knowledge of the system is not necessarily complete, and his emphases are sometimes different. Thus, he shows some awareness of earlier discussions of phantasia (impressions) but does not explore the topic deeply; on the other hand, he gives assent and impulse the same kind of significance in ethics as Chrysippus had. Contrary to some earlier studies, this chapter does not find Seneca to be innovative as concerns volition (voluntas) or the will. Likewise, his analysis of the emotions and of involuntary emotional response finds parallel in earlier texts. For the good emotions (eupatheiai) of the Stoic sage, he seems to know only that part of the analysis that concerns joy, to which he assigns an important role in his own ethics.

The Introduction highlights the main research topic, the research questions, the research methodology and the course of the argument. It argues that human rights form a central normative achievement of human moral and legal history. It highlights the egalitarian epistemic foundations of the human rights project. The assumption that all human beings have equal access to normative insights empowers human beings. The research in human rights as part of an inquiry into human moral and legal understanding is one of the most interesting projects of current science. Only an approach including perspectives from history, philosophy, legal theory, law and psychology and cognitive science can hope to provide sufficiently rich insights. The inquiry is also important because of different current attacks against human rights – for instance, from human rights history and cognitive science. The epistemology of human rights needs to address in particular the rich research in moral psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science on moral and legal phenomena. Human rights considered are not only found in international law, but also in constitutional and supranational law, in ethics and politics.

The chapter addresses current neuroscientific theories of morality and in particular of human rights. A central paradigm of research is the trolley problems. It has been held that fMRI studies have shown that deontological morality is devoid of cognitive content and emotional. From this point of view, systems of ethics are post-hoc rationalizations of these emotional mechanisms. Therefore, answers to central normative questions in a society must be based on utilitarian principles. The background of these theories is the dual-process model of the mind. Behavioral economics has provided many interesting empirical studies about moral cognition that are the basis for the economic analysis of law, including the analysis of human rights. These theories are critically assessed regarding their paradigms, methods used and theoretical interpretations. In particular, it is important to engage in a differentiated analysis of the structure and content of moral judgment. The interpretation of data is dependent on an analytical account of the problem studied – for instance, the trolley problems. As a result, it is argued, there are no compelling reasons to abandon deontological moral reasoning.

One bad act can permanently stain perceptions of someone’s character. Being labeled a criminal potentially has such an enduring stigma because of people’s willingness to believe that people have an internal, unchanging essence leading them to transgress. In Study 1, we developed a novel scale to assess individual differences in essentialist beliefs about criminality and found that these beliefs predicted punitiveness. Study 2 replicated these findings and also revealed that participants’ attitudes toward people who had committed crimes mediated this link. Study 3 found that participants who held essential beliefs about criminality were more likely to choose retributive punishments over those that prevented future harm. These results illustrate the importance of essentialist beliefs in the context of the legal system.

Scott Jenkins concentrates on the specific passion of self-contempt that plays such a large role in the Prologue of Nietzsche’s book where the Übermensch is introduced. This evaluative emotional state sounds unpleasant and unhealthy, but Scott shows why Nietzsche recommends it as a distinctive self-critical stance that is actually grounded in true self-love. We must be careful, Scott says, not to confuse it with the two familiar varieties of contempt discussed by Nietzsche, noble indifference and moral vengefulness. Instead, we should regard it as Nietzsche’s secular transposition of religious-ascetic contempt. Here we take a critical attitude toward our present state as falling short of a superior future ideal that lies within us which we love and yearn to realize. This is why Zarathustra says, paradoxically, that he loves humans and wants them to perish for the sake of a superior Übermensch species.

Neil Sinhababu is interested in showing the significance of TSZ for today’s philosophical work in moral psychology. According to Sinhababu, this book is the only place where we can find Nietzsche’s most compelling critique of the rationalist idea that reason is independent of the passions and constitutes a person’s true self as well as the ground of his virtue. Through a close examination of two chapters from the start of TSZ, Sinhababu shows how Nietzsche defends the Humean claim (as perhaps absorbed from his reading of Schopenhauer) that the bodily passions use reason as their tool and constitute a person’s self and virtues. He also shows how Nietzsche anticipates and rebuts the recently influential counter-arguments of Christine Korsgaard and John McDowell. In Sinhababu’s analysis, Nietzsche would have rejected Korsgaard’s unified agent requirement and would have argued that the phenomenology of bodily passions is sufficient to explain McDowell’s idea of perceptual saliences.