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What Is Morality?

Societal underpinnings of "right" and "wrong"

Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

How Morals Are Established

Morals that transcend time and culture, examples of morals, morality vs. ethics, morality and laws.

Morality refers to the set of standards that enable people to live cooperatively in groups. It’s what societies determine to be “right” and “acceptable.”

Sometimes, acting in a moral manner means individuals must sacrifice their own short-term interests to benefit society. Individuals who go against these standards may be considered immoral.

It may be helpful to differentiate between related terms, such as immoral , nonmoral , and amoral . Each has a slightly different meaning:

• Immoral : Describes someone who purposely commits an offensive act, even though they know the difference between what is right and wrong
• Nonmoral : Describes situations in which morality is not a concern
• Amoral : Describes someone who acknowledges the difference between right and wrong, but who is not concerned with morality

Morality isn’t fixed. What’s considered acceptable in your culture might not be acceptable in another culture. Geographical regions, religion, family, and life experiences all influence morals. 

Scholars don’t agree on exactly how morals are developed. However, there are several theories that have gained attention over the years:

• Freud’s morality and the superego: Sigmund Freud suggested moral development occurred as a person’s ability to set aside their selfish needs (id) to be replaced by the values of important socializing agents, such as a person’s parents, teachers, and institutions (superego).
• Piaget’s theory of moral development: Jean Piaget focused on the social-cognitive perspective of moral development. He theorized that moral development unfolds over time alongside the progressing stages of cognitive development. Early on, children learn to adopt certain moral behaviors for their own sake (it makes them feel good), rather than just abide by moral codes because they don’t want to get into trouble. By adolescence, you can think more abstractly, and begin to make moral decisions based on higher universal principles and the greater good of society.
• B.F. Skinner’s behavioral theory: B.F. Skinner focused on the power of external forces that shaped an individual’s development. For example, a child who receives praise for being kind may treat someone with kindness again out of a desire to receive more positive attention in the future.
• Kohlberg’s moral reasoning: Lawrence Kohlberg proposed six stages of moral development that went beyond Piaget’s theory. Through a series of questions or moral dilemmas, Kohlberg proposed that an adult’s stage of reasoning could be identified.
• Gilligan's perspective of gender differences in moral reasoning . Carol Gilligan criticized Kohlberg for being male-centric in his theory of moral development. She explained that men are more justice-oriented in their moral reasoning; whereas, women are more care-oriented . Within that context, moral dilemmas will have different solutions depending on which gender is doing the reasoning.

What Is the Basis of Morality?

There are different theories as to how morals are developed. However, most theories acknowledge the external factors (parents, community, etc.) that contribute to a child's moral development. These morals are intended to benefit the group that has created them.

Most morals aren’t fixed. They usually shift and change over time.

Ideas about whether certain behaviors are moral—such as engaging in pre-marital sex, entering into same-sex relationships, and using cannabis—have shifted over time. While the bulk of the population once viewed these behaviors as “wrong,” the vast majority of the population now finds these activities to be “acceptable.”

In some regions, cultures, and religions, using contraception is considered immoral. In other parts of the world, some people consider contraception the moral thing to do, as it reduces unplanned pregnancy, manages the population, and reduces the risk of sexually transmitted illnesses.

7 Universal Morals

Some morals seem to transcend across the globe and across time, however. Researchers have discovered that these seven morals seem somewhat universal:

• Defer to authority
• Help your group
• Love your family
• Return favors
• Respect others’ property

The following are common morality examples that you may have been taught growing up, and may have even passed on to younger generations:

• Have empathy
• Don't steal
• Tell the truth
• Treat others as you want to be treated

People might adhere to these principles by:

• Being an upstanding citizen
• Doing volunteer work
• Donating money to charity
• Forgiving someone
• Not gossiping about others
• Offering their time and help to others

To get a sense of the types of morality you were raised with, think about what your parents, community and/or religious leaders told you that you "should" or "ought" to do.

Some scholars don’t distinguish between morals and ethics . Both have to do with “right and wrong.”

However, some people believe morality is personal while ethics refer to the standards of a community.

For example, your community may not view premarital sex as a problem. But on a personal level, you might consider it immoral. By this definition, your morality would contradict the ethics of your community.

Both laws and morals are meant to regulate behavior in a community to allow people to live in harmony. Both have firm foundations in the concept that everyone should have autonomy and show respect to one another.

Legal thinkers interpret the relationship between laws and morality differently. Some argue that laws and morality are independent. This means that laws can’t be disregarded simply because they’re morally indefensible.

Others believe law and morality are interdependent. These thinkers believe that laws that claim to regulate behavioral expectations must be in harmony with moral norms. Therefore, all laws must secure the welfare of the individual and be in place for the good of the community.

Something like adultery may be considered immoral by some, but it’s legal in most states. Additionally, it’s illegal to drive slightly over the speed limit but it isn’t necessarily considered immoral to do so.

There may be times when some people argue that breaking the law is the “moral” thing to do. Stealing food to feed a starving person, for example, might be illegal but it also might be considered the “right thing” to do if it’s the only way to prevent someone from suffering or dying.

Think About It

It can be helpful to spend some time thinking about the morals that guide your decisions about things like friendship, money, education, and family. Understanding what’s really important to you can help you understand yourself better and it may make difficult decisions easier.

Merriam-Webster. A lesson on 'unmoral,' 'immoral,' 'nonmoral,' and 'amoral.'

Ellemers N, van der Toorn J, Paunov Y, van Leeuwen T. The psychology of morality: A review and analysis of empirical studies published from 1940 through 2017 . Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2019;23(4):332-366. doi:10.1177/1088868318811759

Curry OS, Mullins DA, Whitehouse H. Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies . Current Anthropology. 2019;60(1):47-69. doi:10.1086/701478

Encyclopædia Britannica.  What's the difference between morality and ethics?

Moka-Mubelo W. Law and morality . In:  Reconciling Law and Morality in Human Rights Discourse . Vol 3. Springer International Publishing; 2017:51-88. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-49496-8_3

By Amy Morin, LCSW Amy Morin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and international bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk,  "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love

Susan Wolf,  The Variety of Values: Essays on Morality, Meaning, and Love , Oxford University Press, 2015, 263pp., $45.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780195332810.

Reviewed by Sara Protasi, University of Puget Sound

Few essays evoke the same enthusiastic praise for their combination of rigorous reasoning, elegant writing style and influential thesis as Susan Wolf's "Moral Saints." [1] Its placement as the inaugural piece in this collection allows one to see that it is not only chronologically but also conceptually prior to Wolf's subsequent essays. It contains the seeds, in Wolf's own metaphor, from which sprouted an impressively cohesive collection of arguments concerning the forcefulness and inescapability of moral demands, and the significance and resilience of nonmoral values.

In the introduction, with a mixture of humility and pride, Wolf calls attention to the systematic nature of these thirteen articles (only one of which is previously unpublished), and details the connections among them. She highlights central, recurrent ideas and explains how the essays relate to the original themes of "Moral Saints," namely how there is more to value than morality, how moral considerations may be less forceful than moral philosophers have often portrayed them, and how different value reasons can pull us in opposite directions. The first part of the book, "Moral and Nonmoral Values," focuses on the nature and importance of nonmoral values, and their relation to moral ones. The connected topic of the structure and importance of morality is discussed in part 4, "The Concept of Duty." In the middle, part 2 ("Meaning in Life") explores the topic of meaningfulness, and part 3 discusses "Love".

Wolf devotes the final section of the introduction to the cover of the book, which features a still life by Willem Heda, the Dutch painter, depicting the remains of a luscious feast. Wolf tells us that she appreciates the Dutch Golden Age genre because of its rich textures, and one cannot help but think of the rich textures of her philosophical writing. Wolf explains that she is attracted by what she considers these paintings' characteristic "ambivalence and ambiguity" (8): in the Calvinist context where they were produced and sold, sensual pleasures and appreciation of material goods were condemned, and still lifes were allegories of transience, warnings against appreciating things that are doomed to decay. But the paintings themselves are magnificent objects, and their melancholic message is obfuscated, contradicted, and possibly nullified by the very means with which it is conveyed.

Wolf is here pointing to a tension that infuses all the essays, one way or the other: the tension between moral demands ("don't value material goods!") and the demands of beauty, of taste, and, in general, of nonmoral value. She constantly shows us how decent, well-rounded agents cannot, and should not, always wholeheartedly comply with their moral obligations, for two reasons. First, because nonmoral values are intrinsically important, and Wolf convincingly articulates this importance throughout the book, highlighting the shallowness of the dichotomy morality vs. self-interest that was characteristic of moral philosophy when "Moral Saints" was published. Second, because morality cannot keep its irreplaceable role of requiring us to take into account the needs and interests of others, if it is too demanding. When we conceive of morality as overriding every other practical consideration, people will not have "the freedom to live lives that they can find to be good and rewarding" (228) and will be less inclined to respect moral imperatives.

Notwithstanding her commitment to the plurality of values, however, Wolf ends up neglecting some crucial aspects of what is symbolized in her beloved Dutch Golden Age paintings: our embodied, emotional nature, our being subject to impulses and unendorsed habits, our being attuned to and appreciative of simple pleasures, such as the pleasures of the table that are the subject of Heda's still lifes.

To start with this last point: Wolf rarely talks in positive terms about the more mundane kinds of nonmoral values that occupy a central role in most people's lives. For instance, in "Good-for-Nothings" (ch. 5), she rejects a welfarist theory of value, arguing that there can be things that are good independently of the fact that they benefit us: "These things are not good because they benefit us; they benefit us because they are good" (76). Her examples of good things are: reading Middlemarch , watching The Wire , practicing the cello, training for a marathon, appreciating seventeenth century Dutch paintings, and more generally "good art, good philosophy, good science" (73). She explicitly contrasts these activities and pursuits with less valuable counterparts: reading The Da Vinci Code , watching Project Runway , and playing Angry Birds.

Wolf's examples of good things are well-chosen to resonate with her audience of professional philosophers in the Anglophone tradition, in its current demographic make-up. Extending Wolf's point to different cultural and socio-economic contexts seems relatively straightforward. For instance, we could talk of reading the Mahabharata , watching Taiwanese puppetry shows, practicing the djembe. However, this expansion would leave unaltered the most significant feature of Wolf's examples: they are all meant to be expressions of excellence . After saying that art, philosophy, and science are among the "things of immeasurable value" (76) with which the world is replete, and that "we may think of our lives as better, and more fortunate, insofar as we are able to be in appreciative touch with some of the most valuable of these" (76), Wolf goes on to say that "a good human life involves 'enjoyment of the excellent'" (77). But having immeasurable value is not the same as being excellent, and treating them as equivalent has two consequences.

First, it makes one more likely to overlook admittedly less complex sources of values, such as those stemming from appreciation of natural beauty, or from sensual activities such as eating, or having sex, the kind of transient but valuable experiences that were shunned by Dutch Calvinists.

Secondly, it risks restricting the chance of a "better, and more fortunate" life to those who are capable of experiencing excellence. Consider a cognitively disabled person. Her impairment prevents her from intellectual excellence: she cannot read Middlemarch , nor understand The Wire , and she could never distinguish a Rembrandt from a Kinkade. She does, however, watch Project Runway , she can read children books, and she really enjoys eating juicy apples and walking in the park. Her impairment also prevents her from moral excellence. While she may be naturally virtuous, in the Aristotelian sense, she cannot achieve practical wisdom, distinguish between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, or maximize utility. Finally, while she is affectionate to her family members, her loving behavior is often immature and self-centered, comparable to that of a toddler. But even though moral, intellectual, and "interpersonal" excellence are bound to be out of her reach, she is in appreciative touch with some things of immeasurable value, and I hesitate to think that her life is less good and less fortunate than mine.

Another context in which Wolf's view could be enriched by taking into consideration a greater variety of psychological profiles is her discussion of personal love. Love is the main topic of chapters 9, 10 and 11, but also comes up in other essays as an exemplary source of "values . . . that compete both motivationally and normatively with moral values" (5). In "The Importance of Love" (ch. 10), Wolf defines love as "caring, deeply and personally, for a person for her own sake" (191). It is an "orientation in the world" that "gives us reasons to live" (191).

Wolf's account is close to the commonsensical understanding of love, and similar to other influential philosophical accounts, such as Harry Frankfurt's. [2] But specific to her approach is how Wolf envisions the role of love's reasons in practical deliberation. In "Morality and Partiality" (ch. 3), for instance, Wolf defends a conception of morality that incorporates what she calls the Impartialist Insight -- "the claim that all persons are equally deserving of well-being and respect" (33) -- in a "moderate" way, so as to be compatible with the demands of partiality "without apology" (35). Her approach on the one hand acknowledges that friendship and love are valuable in themselves, independently of their contribution to morality, but on the other also embraces the possibility of a radical choice in favor of partiality, even at a grave moral cost: the choice of a woman to hide her criminal son from the police, causing an innocent to be imprisoned in his place. Wolf suggests that the woman's hesitation to act according to morality is not only understandable but "positively reasonable . . . . After all, if the meaning of one's life and one's very identity is bound with someone as deeply as a mother's life is characteristically tied to her son's, why should the dictates of impartial morality be regarded as decisive?" (41). She goes on to say that such a woman might be as worthy of admiration and respect as her counterpart who decides not to shelter her son.

While I am sympathetic with Wolf's picture, I worry that she relies on an all-too-rosy picture of motherhood and maternal love, thus implicitly moralizing love itself. To the extent that Wolf convinces us that partiality can reasonably trump impartiality, she succeeds in doing so by describing the mother as engaging in "tortured deliberations" (42), ready to sacrifice her own well-being for the sake of her son's: "Do to me what you like . . . . Judge me as you will. I will go to hell if I have to, but my son is more important to me than my moral salvation." (41). This mother is a selfless martyr. Some readers might in fact take issue with precisely this quasi-fanatical aspect: perhaps she should worry more about the innocent man who will go to jail in her son's place than about her own moral salvation. But even those who feel the pull of Wolf's example, and I am one of them, should bear in mind that there are darker and less valuable ways in which maternal and filial identity are tied up, than pure maternal altruism. Consider the case of a mother who is affected either by narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, or is just plain selfish. [3] Such mothers will be pained at the prospect of their child's going to jail because of the suffering it would cause to them . The shared sense of identity characterizing these relatively common relations is deeply problematic. To the extent that Wolf succeeds in showing that the mother's choice is respectable, or even admirable, she does so by relying not so much on the value of love itself, but on the value of a moralized picture of love.

Consider also Wolf's example in "'One Thought Too Many': Love, Morality, and the Ordering of Commitment" (ch. 9). The essay examines Bernard Williams' famous discussion of the man who rescues his wife instead of another drowning stranger, and who ought not, according to Williams, be motivated by the thought that she is his wife and it is permissible for him to favor her over a stranger. [4] Wolf reviews different interpretations and consequent responses to Williams' thesis, and concludes that the most common reaction is to agree with Williams that "the thought of moral permissibility would be one thought too many if it is understood to occur at the moment of action" (145, original emphases). This view, according to Wolf, is compatible with finding "nothing wrong with a person wondering, in a cool and reflective moment, under what conditions one may give preference to one's loved ones and under what conditions one may not" (146). But -- she argues -- there is in fact something wrong with the husband who reflects, in cold mind, about whether what he did was morally permissible: it is an unappealing personal ideal of a lover. In the essay she offers an alternative ideal, or rather "glimpses of a psychological profile that could be filled out so as to constitute an ideal" (161): a lover who would not constrain his actions to only those that are morally permissible, and who is unlikely to engage in moral deliberation, even hypothetically, over Williams' scenario. Wolf highlights that this is a personal and not a moral ideal, one she wishes she could realize and that she wishes for her children and friends.

Wolf claims to have sketched a psychological profile, but she does not pause to consider whether the husband depicted by Williams is a psychologically ordinary husband. Wolf is clearly sensitive to the constraints imposed on our moral ideals by nonmoral values. But there are also other constraints, imposed by our psychology.

I myself know that I fall short of being the kind of person that Wolf has in mind. I engage in the post-hoc reflections about what morality requires that Wolf deems as obtrusive, and the reason I do is that I sometimes need morality to nudge me to fulfill the demands of love. [5] Lovers are not always capable of putting their beloveds' interests before their own, for a variety of factors: weakness of the will, egoism, and, more relevant to Williams' scenario, primal instincts and emotions such as the hunger that made fathers fight with their sons over a piece of bread in concentration camps, [6] or the panic that makes a man flee in front of an avalanche instead of protecting his wife and children, [7] or, less dramatically, the sleep deprivation and exhaustion that causes petty fights between parents of a newborn.

One might respond on Wolf's behalf that she is explicit about the ideal nature of her lover, so that we should exclude those psychological facts that count as character flaws. But imagine a case in which our husband is a military rescuer. He has been trained to defeat his survival instinct, so there is no risk of him running for his life in front of an avalanche. However, he has also been trained to save perfect strangers. This is not only a deeply engrained habit, but also a part of his identity. When the avalanche approaches, his wife is at 50 meters from him, but another woman, older and less fit than his wife, is closer. It would be physically possible for him to run faster and save his wife. However, his training and professional identity kick in and he runs to save the stranger. Would a post-hoc reflection be inappropriate in this case? Could this person not be a desirable, even ideal love partner?

Wolf's decent human agents are very decent, but sometimes not quite human enough. Reflecting over less idealized profiles of lovers allows us to see also how the very boundaries between normative and axiological domains are sometimes, maybe often, blurry: in real life situations, it is often difficult to distinguish between different kinds of reasons and values. Whether or not a tired woman wakes her husband when the baby needs to be changed may be a complex deliberative act, and the final decision might be justified by a moral reason (he changed the baby earlier in the night, so it's only fair she lets him sleep), a loving one (he is sleeping so well, poor thing), both, or none (there was no time to think, she just instinctively rushed to the crib). Appreciating the variety of values means also appreciating the variety of value , its own internal miscellaneous messiness.

This remark is of course Wolfian in spirit, and I see it showcased by the essay where we find the most psychologically realistic, and thus highly flawed, examples of human agents: "Loving Attention: Lessons in Love from The Philadelphia Story " (ch. 10). Wolf uses the movie The Philadelphia Story as a case study for understanding Iris Murdoch's notion of loving attention as a moral virtue. Wolf's conclusion is that loving attention can be a moral virtue insofar as it is interpreted as "loving of the world" (177). This conclusion is reached through a detailed analysis of the movie and the loving styles of it characters. This method of inquiry, inherently attuned to the complexity of human psychology, not coincidentally leads Wolf to minimize the differences between the domains of value: personal love is argued to be fundamentally analogous to loving the world, including people who are evil and thus unworthy of love, and to love of the arts, and even, maybe, love of chocolate and basketball (cf. footnote 11, 179).

If I had to summarize the gist of my critical remarks in a slogan, it would be: "more chocolate and basketball, please". But I would not be in the position of making such remarks had it not been for Susan Wolf's ground-breaking articulation of the importance of not being saintly.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their feedback on this review I thank Aaron Meskin and Shen-yi Liao, and especially Michael Della Rocca and Tyler Doggett for extensive discussions.  

[1] Journal of Philosophy 79(8): 419-439 (1982).

[2] It would have been interesting for Wolf to compare her view to Frankfurt's view in The Reasons of Love (Princeton University Press, 2006), especially given their opposite perspectives on the relation between love for others and self-love.

[3] Lydia Davis portrays such a mother in "Selfish" ( The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis , Penguin, 2011, 441-442). The story is chilling because the mother is not depicted as abnormal in a clinical sense, even though of course the distinction between a psychological pathology and a moral flaw may not always be easy to draw.

[4] Bernard Williams, Moral Luck , Cambridge University Press, 1981, 1-19. For simplicity throughout the paper I maintain the husband/wife language, which does not imply endorsing a conventional picture of romantic love, according to which lovers are heterosexual, married, etc.

[5] I do not mean to imply that Wolf is not aware of the existence of conflicts between one's self-interests and the interests of our beloved, as she explicitly talks about these conflicts (see, e.g., the conclusion of ch. 3, p. 46). What I argue here is that the existence of these conflicts should play a larger role in determining what ideals of love are obtainable, and thus desirable.

[6] As recounted by Primo Levi in If This is a Man , Abacus, 2013.

[7] This example is inspired by the movie Force Majeure .

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The origins of morality: an essay in philosophical anthropology.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

By what steps, historically, did morality emerge? Our remote ancestors evolved into social animals. Sociality requires, among other things, restraints on disruptive sexual, hostile, aggressive, vengeful, and acquisitive behavior. Since we are innately social and not social by convention, we can assume the biological evolution of the emotional equipment – numerous predispositions to want, fear, feel anxious or secure – required for social living, just as we can assume cultural evolution of various means to control antisocial behavior and reinforce the prosocial kind. Small clans consisting, say, of several extended families whose members cooperated in hunting, gathering, defense, and child-rearing could not exist without a combination of innate and social restraints on individual behavior.

I shall argue for a naturalistic theory of morality, by which I do not mean the definitional claims G.E. Moore sought to refute, but a broader and more complex theory that maintains that a sufficient understanding of human nature, history, and culture can fully explain morality; that nothing is left hanging. A theory that coherently brings together the needed biological, psychological, and cultural facts I shall call a philosophical anthropology; it is a theory that:

1) takes the good for humans – both an ultimate good (if there is any) and other important goods – to depend on human nature;

2) argues that a rudimentary but improving scientific and philosophical theory of human nature now exists, and thus denies that people are “essenceless”;

3) takes this theory to be evolutionary and historical, making the question “How did morality originate?” pivotal for ethical theory, but leaves open the empirical question of the relative importance of biological and cultural evolution; and

4) takes the origin of the moral ideas to be explainable in terms of human nature and history.

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1 For example, Jeremy Bentham's claim that “good” means “pleasant,” a similar claim that Moore attributed to John Stuart Mill, and the claim of some moralists that “right” means “commanded by God.”

2 Boyd , Robert and Richerson , Peter J. , Culture and the Evolutionary Process ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1985 ), p. 1 . Google Scholar

3 Philosophers who defend an objective status for morality, currently called “moral realism,” are defensive about what they mean by “moral facts” or “moral properties,” and spend more time saying what they do not mean than what they do. Philosophers' claims about moral facts range from hard ontological claims about moral properties to a mere indication that they take folk morality at face value, by which I mean they endorse lay claims that torture is wrong and (if asked by philosophers) that it is true that torture is wrong.

4 In the Treatise , bk. III, pt. I, sec. I, where I interpret his remarks to imply a proto-emotivism.

5 As developed by him in Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).

6 I shall emphasize aversions rather than desires, because most moral rules are prohibitory and function to protect people from what they very much fear. Nonetheless, the bridge theory also lets us infer moral beliefs about positive duties of compassion, loyalty, and so on.

7 I give an explanation of a bridge theory for retributive justice, together with an argument for the social necessity of retribution, in “An Explanation of Retribution,” Journal of Philosophy (September 1988).

8 In Hare , Freedom and Reason ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1963 ). Google Scholar

9 Kohlberg , Laurence stages are described in many of his writings. A late version of them is in The Unstudied Curriculum ( Washington : Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development , 1970 ) Google Scholar : The Pre-Conventional Level

Stage 1 . The punishment and obedience orientation. Morality is avoidance of punishment and unquestioning deference to power.

Stage 2 . The instrumental relativist orientation. Right action is what gets you what you want, sometimes by trading favors.

The Conventional Level

Stage 3 . The “good boy – nice girl” orientation. Morality is earning approval by conforming and being “nice.”

Stage 4 . The “law and order” orientation. Morality is doing one's duty in the sense of respecting authority and the social order.

The Post-Conventional or Principled Level

Stage 5 . The social-contract orientation. Morality is based on law, rights, and social utility.

Stage 6 . The universal ethical principle orientation. Morality is a matter of self-chosen universal principles of justice.

10 See, for example, numerous passages in Boas , Franz The Mind of Primitive Man ( New York : The Macmillan Co. , 1938 ) Google Scholar , Benedict , Ruth Patterns of Culture ( Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. , 1959 ) Google Scholar , Lewis , I. M. , Social Anthropology in Perspective ( New York : Penguin Books , 1976 ) Google Scholar , and Shils , Edward , Tradition ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1981 ). Google Scholar

11 Marx explains alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (first published in 1932).

12 Seeman , Melvin , “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review , 1959 . Google Scholar

13 Discussed and defended at length by Durkheim , in Suicide , first published in Paris in 1897 . Google Scholar

14 See especially Gehlen , Der Mensch, Seine Natur und Seine Stellung in der Well ( Wiesbaden : AULA Verlag , 1986 ). Google Scholar

15 Most modern analyses of alienation view alienated people as victims either of the social/economic system or of something else that is not their responsibility. Common moral opinion, however, is that people ought to have a sense of possession and regard for their family, community, or organization, and that alienated people are proper objects of criticism. In modern industrial societies, however, the matter is complicated because of the general sense that there is also something wrong with the social structure if it produces significant numbers of alienated people.

16 This suggestion was made by Sober at a conference on evolutionary biology, The Ohio State University, December 1988.

17 In pt. I, secs. I and II, of bk. III of Hume's Treatise . In sec. II he tells us that “The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration…. We do not infer a character to be virtuous because it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.” Of all the classical theories of the nature of moral beliefs and judgments, Hume's is most consonant with what I am proposing.

18 One might think that I have ignored the “performative” role of moral utterances. I think that “S said ‘I promise’” is a special case and that “S believes lying is always wrong” is sufficiently like “S believes he has an ulcer” that S can be mistaken about each. The grain of truth in the idea of the creative power of moral words, however, is that in the appropriate circumstances “I believe that lying is always wrong” can be self-justifying – that is, my saying it will make it true that I believe that.

19 That is, the conditions that satisfy a bridge theory and under which they would, were it not for their quirk about moral language, call them wrong and wicked.

20 That is, a Prisoners’ Dilemma matrix for cooperative, exploitative, and mixed societies shows that in the best society (as defined by summed utilities) the individual is second best off, and is best off as the benefiting party in an exploitative relationship.

21 Not all biological evolution is by natural selection. Some of it instead results from chance combinations of genes, harmless mutation, or genetic drift. There are equally non-adaptive reasons for much of cultural evolution. Moreover, some products of natural selection may have been useful at the time, but no longer are today. I shall consider this last point in more detail when I come to Richard Alexander's views about the evolution of morality.

22 See, for example, Nagel , arguments about the badness of pain in The View From Nowhere ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1986 ) Google Scholar ; Sturgeon , attempt, in “Moral Explanations,” eds. Copp , D. and Zimmerman , D. , Morality, Reason and Truth ( Rowman and Allanheld , 1984 ) Google Scholar , to refute Gilbert Harman's ethical relativism; and Brink , criticisms, in “ Moral Realism and the Sceptical Arguments from Disagreement and Queerness ,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 62 ( 1984 ), pp. 111 –25 CrossRef Google Scholar , of Mackie , John arguments in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ( New York : Viking Penquin, Inc. , 1985 ) Google Scholar against the existence of moral facts.

23 As presented in Mackie's Ethics; Inventing Right and Wrong .

24 See Blackburn , Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1984 ). Google Scholar

25 Murphy , Jeffrie , Evolution, Morality, and the Meaning of Life ( Totowa : Rowman and Littlefield , 1982 ). Google Scholar

26 ibid ., p. 76.

27 ibid ., p. 85.

28 ibid ., p. 87.

29 See various sections of Eibl-Eibesfeldt , Love and Hate , trans. Geoffrey , Strachan ( New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston , 1972 ), especially pp. 155 –65. Google Scholar

30 If group selection were true, the structure of morality probably would have been different; the varieties of altruism and sexual strategies would also have been different, and therefore sexual morality too. But there is no good evidence that it is true, with the exception of an ingenious model of group selection devised by David Sloan Wilson that actually works, but probably only for some of the social hymenoptera. See Wilson “The Group Selection Controversy: History and Current Status,” Annual Review of Ecological Systems, 1983 , and a number of other papers by him.

31 Evolutionary theorists commonly speak of genes as wanting, sacrificing themselves, and being selfish or altruistic. They feel comfortable speaking this way because they know they can unpack that talk into a much more cumbersome account of, say, a gene's selfishness as its disposition to cause its animal host to behave in ways that tend to get the gene-type replicated in the next generation, and so on.

32 A good example of possible technology upsetting concepts is the science fiction case of replicating an object of love: we evolved to love our own child, but what if the machine makes ten, exactly alike? We just get confused, for reasons not unlike our confusion about personal identity in the face of thought experiments about replication of the self.

33 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate , p. 98.

34 Walzer , Michael , Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations ( New York : Basic Books , 1977 ), p. 140 . Google Scholar

35 The Nagas were (and apparently no longer are) head hunters from Northeastern India, and are described in detail by (among others) von Füher-Haimendorf , Christoph in Morals and Merit ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1967 ). Google Scholar It would be hard to find a better example of a determinate boundary to one's moral community. Within their villages, the Nagas observed civility, law, rules of social morality, and a sense of community; outside, the state of nature and heads.

36 Alexander , Richard , The Biology of Moral Systems ( New York : Aldine de Gruyter , 1987 ), pp. 77 – 78 . Google Scholar I have criticized Alexander's theory in a review of his book in Mind , June 1989.

37 Trivers , Robert , “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology , 1971 . Google Scholar

38 Indeed, no one knew this for sure until Robert Axelrod showed that the Prisoners’ Dilemma strategy called Tit-for-Tat, which in form is nearly identical with reciprocal altruism, wins against all known competitors. See his The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and also described by Hofstadter , Douglas R. , “Metamagical Themas,” Scientific American (May 1983 ). Google Scholar

39 I mean particular passions as Bishop Butler explains them in Sermon XI , direct desires that aim only at their objects: to play, satisfy one's curiosity, rescue a person from the river, and so on.

40 Phenotypic self-sacrifice puts the individual animal at risk; genotypic self-sacrifice is action that tends to diminish the representation of the animal's gene types (and not merely its gene tokens) in subsequent generations.

41 Alexander, p. 160.

42 See especially Lorenz , King Solomon's Ring , trans. Marjorie , Kerr Wilson ( New York : Crowell , 1952 ). Google Scholar

43 It should be mentioned that Boyd and Richerson are interested in cultural evolution as often a superior basis for the explanation of cultural diversity, whereas my interest, and the general goal of a philosophical anthropology, focus on cultural universals (rather than differences) as clues to human nature.

44 See Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature , Lewontin , Richard C. , Rose , Steven , and Kamin , Leon J. ( New York : Pantheon Books , 1984 ) Google Scholar , and much of the writing in the newsletter Science for the People .

45 See the essays in Ideology of in the Natural Sciences , eds. Hilary , Rose and Steven , Rose ( Boston : G. K. Hall , 1980 ). Google Scholar

46 Audrey , Robert , The Territorial Imperative ( New York : Atheneum , 1970 ), p. 102 . Google Scholar

47 See Goodall , Jane in In the Shadow of Man ( Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. , 1971 ) Google Scholar on the incest avoidance of the otherwise promiscuous chimpanzee Flo , , and Shepher , Joseph , “Mate Selection Among Second Generation Kibbutz Adolescents and Adults: Incest Avoidance and Negative Imprinting,” Archives of Sexual Behavior , 1971 Google Scholar , on the lack of sexual liaisons among unrelated young people raised communally in Israeli kibbutzim.

48 William Lycan first called my attention to this puzzle in a conversation a number of years ago.

49 This is discussed in my The Non-Suicidal Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chs. 2, 9, 10, and 18.

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morality , the moral beliefs and practices of a culture , community , or religion or a code or system of moral rules, principles, or values . The conceptual foundations and rational consistency of such standards are the subject matter of the philosophical discipline of ethics , also known as moral philosophy . In its contemporary usage, the term ethics is also applied to particular moral codes or systems and to the empirical study of their historical development and their social, economic, and geographic circumstances ( see comparative ethics ).

(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)

Empirical studies show that all societies have moral rules that prescribe or forbid certain classes of action and that these rules are accompanied by sanctions to ensure their enforcement. It has been observed, for example, that virtually every society has well-established norms dealing with matters such as family organization and individual duties, sexual activity,  property rights, personal welfare, truth telling, and promise keeping. Among all societies some moral rules are nearly universal—such as those forbidding murder , theft , infidelity or adultery , and incest —while others vary between societies or exist in some societies but not in others—such as those forbidding polygamy , parricide, and feticide ( abortion ).

The existence of nearly universal moral rules has raised the question of whether such common practices are rooted in human nature and whether their commonality or naturalness renders them objectively valid in some sense. A related question is whether there exists a single, objectively valid moral code that is rationally discoverable even though it is not fully instantiated in the moral beliefs and practices of any society. In contrast, the diversity of moral rules between societies has raised the question of whether the validity of a moral rule is relative to the society in which it is recognized. Such questions are outside the scope of empirical studies of morality and properly within the domain of philosophical ethics . See ethical relativism .

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What is morality?

• Published: 03 July 2021
• Volume 179 , pages 1113–1133, ( 2022 )

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In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe argued that the moral vocabulary does not correspond to any concept in Aristotelian ethics, that it derives from a confused response to the ethics of divine command, and that it is literally meaningless. This essay contends that Anscombe was wrong. Morality corresponds to Aristotle’s general sense of “justice,” which is complete virtue in relation to others. But Anscombe’s question remains: what is it for an action to be morally wrong, not merely something one should not do? The answer is not that wrongness warrants blame or that an action is wrong when it wrongs another person, but that an action is morally wrong when it is something one should not do that one has no right to do. In the absence of rights, Anscombe’s question has no answer.

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[24]Introduction

Moral Agency

The Philosophy and History of the Moral ‘Ought’: Some of Anscombe’s Objections

Here I follow Doyle ( 2017 ): Part One.

Again, my account of Anscombe agrees with Doyle ( 2017 ): Part One.

Or we could make do with the concept of virtue alone, following David Hume (1739–1740: Book Three). Note that Hume’s virtues are not distinctively moral: he includes among the virtues of character prudence, industry, assiduity, and enterprise.

See, for instance, Parfit ( 2011 ). The problem may extend to other views, as Kamm argues of Scanlon’s Contractualism (Scanlon, 1998 ; Kamm, 2002 : §1.3).

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , 1129b11-4, translated by W. D. Ross and Lesley Brown (2009); henceforth cited in the main text as NE .

For a helpful discussion of these issues, on which I have relied, see Kraut ( 2002 : Chap. 4).

“For this same reason justice, alone of the virtues, is thought to be ‘another’s good’, because it is related to another; for it does what is advantageous to another, either a ruler or a co-partner” ( NE 1130a3-5, responding to Plato’s Republic ).

For this reading of Aristotle, see Thompson ( 2004 : 5–6).

See Darwall ( 2006 , 2017 ); Wallace ( 2007 , 2012 , 2019 ).

This identification has been disputed. Scanlon defends journalistic freedom and free speech on grounds of public interest. But there is no reason to expect that the strongest complaint against illiberal principles will be that of the speaker, as opposed to his or her audience. Contractualism appears to misidentify who is wronged when a speaker is silenced. On this point, see Wenar ( 2013 : 392–393, 395). More generally, insofar as it appeals to the social effects of a principle’s adoption, Contractualism makes the facts about right and wrong implausibly sensitive to irrelevant features of our environment; see Rosen ( 2009 ).

See Darwall ( 2017 : 5), building on the theory in Darwall ( 2006 ).

For discussion and further argument, see Dorr ( 2016 : 43–45). Note that this does not preclude a “fitting attitude” theory of any ethical property whatsoever. For instance, to be blameworthy is to warrant blame. Such theories are ruled out only when the relevant explanatory claim is true, as it is not in this case: you can’t explain why an action is blameworthy by appeal to the fact that it warrants blame, or the reverse. The problem I am raising is specific to the case of moral wrongness, which does explain why an action warrants blame.

Wallace ( 2019 ); see Wallace ( 2007 ) for an earlier critique of Darwall.

The claim that directed obligation and wrongdoing are correlative has been challenged by Nicolas Cornell, who argues that we can wrong other people without violating a right they have against us or a duty that is owed to them (Cornell, 2015 ; see the discussion of Hart, 1955 at Cornell, 2015 : 115–119). I am not persuaded by Cornell’s arguments, which turn on an unduly circumscribed conception of rights, but discussing them here would take us too far afield.

See Wallace ( 2019 : 173). The complication about disregarding (not just violating) moral obligations is explained at Wallace ( 2019 : 10–11, 73–75); it will not be relevant to us. For what seems to be an earlier endorsement of Moral Wrongness as Directed Wrongdoing, see, ironically, Anscombe ( 1967 ). She infers from the premise that an action wrongs no particular individual that it is not wrong.

On beneficence, see Wallace ( 2019 : 205–208), and on the non-identity problem, Wallace ( 2019 : 211–215).

Niko Kolodny (forthcoming: §14) offers a response: a way to identify those who are wronged in the case of gratuitous waste.

Wallace ( 2019 : 27).

Wallace ( 2019 : 28, 49–51).

See also Wallace ( 2019 : 63–64), which contrasts moral obligations with obligations of love and friendship, which are the subject of Wallace ( 2012 ).

The proposal is schematic: it would take some work to specify the kind of explanation involved in the “because.” Does it simply mean that the right or its ground is among the reasons in virtue of which A should ϕ? That threatens to be too expansive. Others may object that there are directed obligations without corresponding rights, as when I have an obligation to save a drowning child at little cost and would wrong the child if I refused. If we think of claim-rights as protecting our autonomy, not as demanding positive aid, my refusal is a case of directed wrongdoing that does not violate a right. But I see no reason to accept this limited conception: the child has a right against me that I save her at little cost.

See Thomson ( 1990 : Chap. 3).

To establish this would take more argument, but it strikes me as a the germ of truth in a point that is framed by Michael Thompson ( 2004 ) in unhelpfully epistemic terms. Roughly speaking, Thompson argues that, when A is obligated to B, both A and B must be in a position to know that they are joined by this obligation, and that such knowledge is possible only if it has a common ground for each. Hence the need for an external relation between them. For objections to the epistemology behind this argument, see Wallace ( 2019 : 119–121). The point in the main text drops the epistemic framing, the need for a common ground of knowledge, in favour of a practical one: the need for a common ground of practical reasons.

Wallace ( 2019 : 112, 115–116, 157–158, 170–175).

Wallace ( 2019 : 81–85).

It is possible that, when you should not do something and others could simply prevent you without infringing your rights, they should prevent you if they have no reason not to. I am not sure if this follows, but even so, it does not follow that we are morally obligated to simply prevent wrongdoing, whenever we can. For it does not follow that others could simply prevent us from simply preventing wrongdoing without infringing our rights.

What does this imply about children’s autonomy? At a very young age, children are unable to respond to reasons and are not truly subject to “shoulds.” We may address “should”-claims to them proleptically, but no more. Suppose, however, we are past that point. Your child should not eat any more Halloween candy, perhaps, but it would not be morally wrong for them to do so. It follows from my view that you would infringe their rights, perhaps justifiably, by simply preventing them. In other words: as soon as a child is subject to reasons, they have autonomy rights of the same sort we do, and deserve apologies in much the same way. If paternalism is more routine in relation to children, that is not because they lack such rights but because we are more often justified in breaching them.

Again, see Dorr ( 2016 : 43–45).

See also White ( 1984 : 59): “the presence of a duty (or obligation) not to V implies the absence of a right to V”.

My treatment of Charity and Voting is indebted to Renée Bolinger ( 2017 : 45–46); she also replies to Waldron’s theoretical argument for a right to do wrong, which I do not take up here; see Bolinger ( 2017 : 46–51) on Waldron ( 1981 : 35–37).

For a nuanced development of this idea, in relation to Kant, see Ripstein ( 2009 ), though the suggestion in the text is not committed to the details of his account.

For versions of this claim, see Gilbert ( 2018 ) and de Kenessey ( 2020 ).

Hart suggests that this is true of promissory obligation, in general: only the promisee may determine how the promisor shall act (Hart 1955 : 184).

Why not adopt the more inclusive view that an act is morally wrong when someone could simply prevent it without infringing your rights? Because you can give someone permission to prevent you from doing what you should not do without making it morally wrong to do it, as when you give me permission to stop you from drinking too much. What if you give everyone permission to prevent you from drinking? Would you then meet the condition in Moral Wrongness as the Absence of a Right? No: because it is impossible to give permission to an arbitrary individual or third party, as opposed to the particular individuals with whom one interacts.

See Miller ( 1995 ) and Cooper ( 1996 ).

See Cooper ( 1996 ) on the legacy of Hegel’s “principle of subjective freedom”.

For data that would bear on these historical conjectures, see Wolf ( 1982 ); Adams ( 1984 ).

In Setiya ( 2007 ), Setiya ( 2012 ), and Setiya ( 2014b ).

I defend this claim in Setiya ( 2014a ), rejecting Scanlon’s view of “buck-passing” (Scanlon 1998 : 11, 95–100).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to: Caroline Arruda, Alisabeth Ayers, Sophie Grace Chappell, Rowan Cruft, Sandy Diehl, Jimmy Doyle, Adam Etinson, Max Hayward, Caspar Hare, Brendan de Kenessey, Daniel Muñoz, Sarah Paul, Anni Räty, Gideon Rosen, Cat Saint-Croix, Tamar Schapiro, Matty Silverstein, Eliot Watkins, Eliza Wells, and Alex Worsnip; to students in a fall 2019 seminar at MIT, which I taught with Jimmy Doyle; to audiences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, New York University, Abu Dhabi, St. Andrews University, and the University of Michigan; and to several anonymous readers.

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100 Words Essay on Morality

What is morality.

Morality is about knowing right from wrong. It’s like an invisible rule book that guides us to be good people. Everyone has different ideas about what is moral because we grow up in different places with different beliefs.

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Morals and society.

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We learn morals from the people around us. Books, stories, and even movies can teach us what is right and wrong. It’s important to keep learning about morals to become better people.

250 Words Essay on Morality

Why is morality important.

Morality is important because it guides us in making choices that are good for everyone. It teaches us to treat others kindly and to be honest. When we follow moral rules, we make our families, schools, and communities better places. It’s like playing a game where everyone knows the rules and plays fairly – the game is more fun that way.

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People learn about what is right and wrong from their families, schools, and the society they live in. Some moral rules are written in laws, and others are things we just know in our hearts. For example, sharing with others is not a law, but it is a kind thing to do.

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Sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is. Different people or cultures might have different ideas about morality. The key is to think about how your actions affect others and to choose to be kind and fair.

Morality is like the glue that holds people together. It helps us know how to act so that we can all get along and be happy. It’s important for everyone to try their best to be moral and do the right thing.

500 Words Essay on Morality

Morality is about knowing the difference between right and wrong or good and bad behavior. It is a set of rules that we live by. These rules can come from our family, religion, or society. They guide us to be good people and to treat others well.

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Different kinds of morals.

There are many kinds of morals because people come from different places and have different beliefs. Some people think it’s very important to be honest, while others think being kind is the most important. But most people agree on some basic things, like not hurting others, not stealing, and treating others as we want to be treated.

Learning About Morality

We learn about morality from when we are very young. Our parents teach us to share and to say “sorry” when we do something wrong. At school, teachers tell us about being fair and not cheating. We also learn from stories and movies that show heroes being brave and doing the right thing.

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Sometimes, it’s hard to be moral. Maybe we are tempted to do something wrong because it seems easier or because we might get something we want. It can also be hard when people around us are not being moral. But sticking to our morals, even when it’s tough, makes us strong and respected.

Morality in the Future

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1 Introduction

• Published: December 2014
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This chapter introduces the book and its discussion of morality, meaning and love, tracing a continuity of interest in the distinction between moral and nonmoral values from 1982 to the present. There are many values whose importance cannot be understood in terms of morality or self-interest. This is related to views about the structure and point of morality, to an understanding of the concept of duty or moral obligation, and to a view that morality is not overriding. It is also related to the argument in the book that meaningfulness is a dimension of a good life distinct from morality and from happiness. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the cover painting, a Dutch still life by William Claesz Heda, that explains how it reflects some of the themes in the book.

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Ethics and Morality

Morality, Ethics, Evil, Greed

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

To put it simply, ethics represents the moral code that guides a person’s choices and behaviors throughout their life. The idea of a moral code extends beyond the individual to include what is determined to be right, and wrong, for a community or society at large.

Ethics is concerned with rights, responsibilities, use of language, what it means to live an ethical life, and how people make moral decisions. We may think of moralizing as an intellectual exercise, but more frequently it's an attempt to make sense of our gut instincts and reactions. It's a subjective concept, and many people have strong and stubborn beliefs about what's right and wrong that can place them in direct contrast to the moral beliefs of others. Yet even though morals may vary from person to person, religion to religion, and culture to culture, many have been found to be universal, stemming from basic human emotions.

• The Science of Being Virtuous
• Understanding Amorality
• The Stages of Moral Development

Those who are considered morally good are said to be virtuous, holding themselves to high ethical standards, while those viewed as morally bad are thought of as wicked, sinful, or even criminal. Morality was a key concern of Aristotle, who first studied questions such as “What is moral responsibility?” and “What does it take for a human being to be virtuous?”

We used to think that people are born with a blank slate, but research has shown that people have an innate sense of morality . Of course, parents and the greater society can certainly nurture and develop morality and ethics in children.

Humans are ethical and moral regardless of religion and God. People are not fundamentally good nor are they fundamentally evil. However, a Pew study found that atheists are much less likely than theists to believe that there are "absolute standards of right and wrong." In effect, atheism does not undermine morality, but the atheist’s conception of morality may depart from that of the traditional theist.

Animals are like humans—and humans are animals, after all. Many studies have been conducted across animal species, and more than 90 percent of their behavior is what can be identified as “prosocial” or positive. Plus, you won’t find mass warfare in animals as you do in humans. Hence, in a way, you can say that animals are more moral than humans.

The examination of moral psychology involves the study of moral philosophy but the field is more concerned with how a person comes to make a right or wrong decision, rather than what sort of decisions he or she should have made. Character, reasoning, responsibility, and altruism , among other areas, also come into play, as does the development of morality.

The seven deadly sins were first enumerated in the sixth century by Pope Gregory I, and represent the sweep of immoral behavior. Also known as the cardinal sins or seven deadly vices, they are vanity, jealousy , anger , laziness, greed, gluttony, and lust. People who demonstrate these immoral behaviors are often said to be flawed in character. Some modern thinkers suggest that virtue often disguises a hidden vice; it just depends on where we tip the scale .

An amoral person has no sense of, or care for, what is right or wrong. There is no regard for either morality or immorality. Conversely, an immoral person knows the difference, yet he does the wrong thing, regardless. The amoral politician, for example, has no conscience and makes choices based on his own personal needs; he is oblivious to whether his actions are right or wrong.

One could argue that the actions of Wells Fargo, for example, were amoral if the bank had no sense of right or wrong. In the 2016 fraud scandal, the bank created fraudulent savings and checking accounts for millions of clients, unbeknownst to them. Of course, if the bank knew what it was doing all along, then the scandal would be labeled immoral.

Everyone tells white lies to a degree, and often the lie is done for the greater good. But the idea that a small percentage of people tell the lion’s share of lies is the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few. It is 20 percent of the population that accounts for 80 percent of a behavior.

We do know what is right from wrong . If you harm and injure another person, that is wrong. However, what is right for one person, may well be wrong for another. A good example of this dichotomy is the religious conservative who thinks that a woman’s right to her body is morally wrong. In this case, one’s ethics are based on one’s values; and the moral divide between values can be vast.

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg established his stages of moral development in 1958. This framework has led to current research into moral psychology. Kohlberg's work addresses the process of how we think of right and wrong and is based on Jean Piaget's theory of moral judgment for children. His stages include pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional, and what we learn in one stage is integrated into the subsequent stages.

The pre-conventional stage is driven by obedience and punishment . This is a child's view of what is right or wrong. Examples of this thinking: “I hit my brother and I received a time-out.” “How can I avoid punishment?” “What's in it for me?” 

The conventional stage is when we accept societal views on rights and wrongs. In this stage people follow rules with a  good boy  and nice girl  orientation. An example of this thinking: “Do it for me.” This stage also includes law-and-order morality: “Do your duty.”

The post-conventional stage is more abstract: “Your right and wrong is not my right and wrong.” This stage goes beyond social norms and an individual develops his own moral compass, sticking to personal principles of what is ethical or not.

Organ donation saves lives. But it's ethically complex.

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Remaining in place through difficulty is one of the best things we can learn to do. But being perseverant does not mean that we never surrender.

Personal Perspective: I chose to follow a lifelong dream and ended up on a Black vacation as a white woman. Was that even okay for me to do?

You must consider whether you still love your partner enough to commit to healing. It won’t be enough if you don’t love them independent of what else you might lose.

Evolutionary psychologists often uncover ugly things about human nature, some of which are nearly universally repulsive. Here are 10.

Have we gone too far to the social, political, and legal extremes? Recent science on left-wing authoritarianism may hold some answers.

New data suggest LLMs can provide moral advice rated more thoughtful, trustworthy, and correct than that of laypeople and experts.

Personal Perspective: Humanism has its roots in Darwin's ideas, which put the entirety of life on the same playing field. We need a humanist approach now more than ever.

Conformity to morality is often mistaken as a panacea for societal issues. Cognitions of reality represent the confounding variable responsible for moral attribution.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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Ethics and Morality Relationship Essay

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Introduction

Relationship between ethics and morality, ethical choices available to hr managers.

Bibliography

Over the years, ethics and morality have often been used synonymously. Although the two terms are closely related both in conceptual and ideal meaning, they have both differences and similarities. This paper, therefore, discusses the relationship between ethics and morality, giving examples of each, and also explores the ethical choices available for human resources managers.

Ethics is a term used to refer to the body of doctrines that guide individuals to behave in a way that is ideologically right, fine, and appropriate. Guidelines or principles that constitute do not at all times lead an individual towards just a solitary moral but act as a way to direct the individual to follow a set of codes of conducts whose objective is to foster overall desirable behaviors in an individual or a group of people (George, 2006).

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ethics are regulations that are clearly stipulated and that guide individuals in determining what to do and what not to. In many organizations, ethics are guided by sets of written laws and regulations that guide the way individuals within them should behave (Conroy & Emerson, 2004).

For example, there could be written principles that guide the way customer service should be undertaken in the organization, rules guarding salespeople against selling inappropriate products to the customers, rules guarding against corruption or undue extortion of money from the customers, principles that direct employees to behave in the highest level of professionalism, integrity, honesty, and humility while serving customers and which are well written down in the organization’s code of conduct.

According to Peterson et al (2005), ethics are a set of rules that direct individuals to decide to act in a correct way. The latter asserts that ethics are embedded in and guided by laws that redirect individuals from doing what their conscience directs them to do and do what is morally correct i.e. they help an individual to avoid doing what he or she wants to but rather do what is correct in moral standards. For instance, someone’s conscience tells him to climb up a neighbor’s apple tree to eat his apples without the latter’s consent, but he shrugs off his personal selfish feelings and abstains from doing such a thing and which he has the power to do due to the respect for the neighbor and his property. The person will make a decision not to eat the neighbor’s apples hence he will have acted in an ethical way.

Ethics leads to honesty, a show of respect for others, and behavior that is consistent with one’s obligation as a member of the organization or a citizen to a country (Conroy & Emerson, 2004). According to the latter, ethics are not innate in an individual but are mainly exotically controlled by laws and regulations are set and enforced by human beings or authority. For example, ethics in marketing are controlled by laws that restrict marketers from engaging in business malpractices such as unhealthy competition, poor product prices, overpricing, and hoarding among other business vices.

George (2006) defines morality from two main perspectives. From an individuals’ perspective, morality is a set of individual’s standards, principles, or customs that greatly shapes an individual’s character trait and way of behavior or the level of which an individual is able to willingly uphold the generally accepted standards of behaviors within a society that he lives in at a specific instance in time. On the other hand, George asserts that societal morals are the universally acceptable code of conduct in a certain society at a specific point of time, and which autonomously guides the behavior of its members.

For instance, stealing is generally not acceptable in society at any one time. As such, it is immoral to steal. In the same way, if the society holds that it is moral to belong to a religion in the 21 st century, it would be immoral according to such a society for a member to be without religion. Similarly, in a society that prostitution is rebuked, it would be immoral for an individual within it to engage in prostitution. Societal standards/ principles change rapidly over time. Similarly, moral standards within a society will vary with time. For example, it was moral to hold slaves in the past. However, this is no longer acceptable in modern society hence it would be immoral for an individual to hold a slave today.

Ethics are guidelines for proper behavior or conduct and they are absolutely not pegged to the specified period in time. As a result, they usually have limited variations overtimes. On the other hand, morality is the acceptable standard within a society at a given point in time (Peterson et al, 2005).

As a result, they change over time. Ethics are more basic and permanent than morality; hence morality is a subset of ethics. Similarly, ethics lead to morality whereas vice versa is not applicable. Moreover, a change in ethics is likely to generate a change in morality. In circumstances where a society or institution amends its code of ethics, the moral standards will obviously be altered (Peterson et al, 2005).

For example, the ethical code of conduct led to the alteration of the slavery law in the eighteenth century which led to slavery being regarded as immoral since then. Unlike the ethical code of conduct which is entrenched in the written artificial laws, morality is more or less entrenched in and controlled by the individual’s personality. As a result, a change in a person’s character trait for the better will make him or her more moral and vice versa. However, the similarity between ethics and morality is that they are all geared towards enhancing the desirable relationship between individuals in the organization, institutions, or society in which they live (Peterson et al, 2005).

There are several ethical choices that are available to human resource managers. These include:

Equity in opportunities and neutrality

Employment takes place in a multifaceted environment. As a result it is ethical for the human resource managers involved in the employment or appointment of personnel in the organization to give equal opportunity for various individual interested in the job to compete on a level ground and pick the most suitable for the job without any discrimination whatsoever(University of Western Australia, 2007). For instance, the recruitment process should be devoid of nepotism, corruption, undue charges to the candidates, bias and prejudices. Employment should be carried out via an open, fair and due process. In addition, HR managers should desist from taking positions that appears to favor one side during dissolution of employees disputes (Lowry , 2006).

Fairness in the treatment of employees and quietism

HR manager will be ethical if they establish an organizational environment in which all employees are treated in a just manner. For instance, the managers should ensure equitable reward system for all employees, just promotions and a system that is without favoritism based on any aspects. In addition, employees need to be treated like people with rights to be honored and defended by the HR manager (Lowry , 2006).

Sexual harassment of employees

The human resources managers will be ethical if they desist from gender stereotypes and sexual harassment of employees. Cases of sexually mistreating of employees by human resources managers are not only unethical but absolutely unacceptable and illegal (University of Western Australia, 2007). For instance, some manager demand for sexual relations with female employees as a leeway to giving them a favor, promotion, salary increment or even initial employment which is against the HR ethical code of conduct (Lowry , 2006).

Privacy and Confidentiality

Human resources code of ethics requires that employee privacy and personal life be respected at all times. For instance, it will be in breach of the ethical code of HR to force the employee to reveal his sexual life information (University of Western Australia, 2007). In addition it is the duty of the manager to safeguard the information given to him by the employees, by treating it with the highest level of confidentiality (Lowry , 2006). For example, if the HR has the information of the employee’s health profile, such information must not be released to the outside without the consent of the employee.

Poaching of employees

In industry HR managers may tend to poach competitors employees so as to lessen their competitive power. In doing this they entice the competitors employees in order to gain undue advantage over rivals which is unethical (University of Western Australia, 2007). In addition ethical human resource managers should be ethically assertive. Remain neutral in resolving employee’s disputes, ethical in dealing with errant employees and should be ethically reactive.

Ethics and morality are two terms that are closely related and which individuals often tend to refer to synonymously. However, the two are different in that while ethics are sets of principles that guide desirable behavior or conducts, morality is the generally acceptable behavior within a society at a given period of time. In addition, morality unlike ethics keeps on changing from time to time as societal values change (Peterson et al, 2005).

Conclusively, it can be held that morality is a subset of ethics since ethics shapes morality while ethics is bigger than morality. Finally, the ethical choices available for HR managers includes, offering equal opportunities in employment, treating all employees fairly, respecting the employees, avoiding ill-led poaching of competitors employees to gain undue advantage over them, respecting employees privacy and confidentiality of information and not sexually mistreating employees. Breaching any of these will be unethical on the part of the HR manger.

Conroy, S.J. and Emerson, (2004) “Business Ethics and Religion: Religiosity as a Predictor of Ethical Awareness among Student Inc Journal of Business Ethics 50 (4):247-258.

George Desnoyers (2006), the relationship between ethics and morality: Inc the Journal of behavioral psychology. Vol. 11 167-186.

Lowry , 2006, Ethical Choices for HR Managers Inc Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources; 44; p.171.

Peterson, et al (2005) Ethics vs. Morality – The Distinction between Ethics and Morals. Web.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy- The Definition of Morality. Web.

University of Western Australia (2007), code of ethics and code of conduct for human resources. Web.

• Job Evaluation of the HR Manager: Performance, Safety, and Professional Development
• Failure to Achieve “Meeting of the Minds”
• Rights, Equity and the State: Dispute Resolution Case
• Ethical Problem of Abortion
• Organ Donation: Ethical Dilemmas
• Ethical Practices in the Workplace
• Moral Clients & Agents and Their Evaluation
• Abortion in Islamic View
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Kant’s Moral Philosophy

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that the supreme principle of morality is a principle of practical rationality that he dubbed the “Categorical Imperative” (CI). Kant characterized the CI as an objective, rationally necessary and unconditional principle that we must follow despite any natural desires we may have to the contrary. All specific moral requirements, according to Kant, are justified by this principle, which means that all immoral actions are irrational because they violate the CI. Other philosophers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Aquinas, had also argued that moral requirements are based on standards of rationality. However, these standards were either instrumental principles of rationality for satisfying one’s desires, as in Hobbes, or external rational principles that are discoverable by reason, as in Locke and Aquinas. Kant agreed with many of his predecessors that an analysis of practical reason reveals the requirement that rational agents must conform to instrumental principles. Yet he also argued that conformity to the CI (a non-instrumental principle), and hence to moral requirements themselves, can nevertheless be shown to be essential to rational agency. This argument was based on his striking doctrine that a rational will must be regarded as autonomous, or free, in the sense of being the author of the law that binds it. The fundamental principle of morality — the CI — is none other than the law of an autonomous will. Thus, at the heart of Kant’s moral philosophy is a conception of reason whose reach in practical affairs goes well beyond that of a Humean ‘slave’ to the passions. Moreover, it is the presence of this self-governing reason in each person that Kant thought offered decisive grounds for viewing each as possessed of equal worth and deserving of equal respect.

Kant’s most influential positions in moral philosophy are found in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (hereafter, “ Groundwork ”) but he developed, enriched, and in some cases modified those views in later works such as The Critique of Practical Reason , The Metaphysics of Morals , Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason as well as his essays on history and related topics. Kant’s Lectures on Ethics , which were lecture notes taken by three of his students on the courses he gave in moral philosophy, also include relevant material for understanding his views. We will mainly focus on the foundational doctrines of the Groundwork , even though in recent years some scholars have become dissatisfied with this standard approach to Kant’s views and have turned their attention to the later works. We find the standard approach most illuminating, though we will highlight important positions from the later works where needed.

1. Aims and Methods of Moral Philosophy

2. good will, moral worth and duty, 3. duty and respect for moral law, 4. categorical and hypothetical imperatives, 5. the formula of the universal law of nature, 6. the humanity formula, 7. the autonomy formula, 8. the kingdom of ends formula, 9. the unity of the formulas, 10. autonomy, 11. non-rational beings and disabled humans, 12. virtue and vice, 13. normative ethical theory, 14. teleology or deontology, 15. metaethics, other internet resources, related entries.

The most basic aim of moral philosophy, and so also of the Groundwork , is, in Kant’s view, to “seek out” the foundational principle of a “metaphysics of morals,” which Kant understands as a system of a priori moral principles that apply the CI to human persons in all times and cultures. Kant pursues this project through the first two chapters of the Groundwork . He proceeds by analyzing and elucidating commonsense ideas about morality, including the ideas of a “good will” and “duty”. The point of this first project is to come up with a precise statement of the principle or principles on which all of our ordinary moral judgments are based. The judgments in question are supposed to be those that any normal, sane, adult human being would accept on due rational reflection. Nowadays, however, many would regard Kant as being overly optimistic about the depth and extent of moral agreement. Perhaps he is best thought of as drawing on a moral viewpoint that is very widely shared and which contains some general judgments that are very deeply held. In any case, he does not appear to take himself to be primarily addressing a genuine moral skeptic such as those who often populate the works of moral philosophers, that is, someone who doubts that she has any reason to act morally and whose moral behavior hinges on a rational proof that philosophers might try to give. For instance, when, in the third and final chapter of the Groundwork , Kant takes up his second fundamental aim, to “establish” this foundational moral principle as a demand of each person’s own rational will, his conclusion apparently falls short of answering those who want a proof that we really are bound by moral requirements. He rests this second project on the position that we — or at least creatures with rational wills — possess autonomy. The argument of this second project does often appear to try to reach out to a metaphysical fact about our wills. This has led some readers to the conclusion that he is, after all, trying to justify moral requirements by appealing to a fact — our autonomy — that even a moral skeptic would have to recognize.

Kant’s analysis of the common moral concepts of “duty” and “good will” led him to believe that we are free and autonomous as long as morality, itself, is not an illusion. Yet in the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant also tried to show that every event has a cause. Kant recognized that there seems to be a deep tension between these two claims: If causal determinism is true then, it seems, we cannot have the kind of freedom that morality presupposes, which is “a kind of causality” that “can be active, independently of alien causes determining it” (G 4:446).

Kant thought that the only way to resolve this apparent conflict is to distinguish between phenomena , which is what we know through experience, and noumena , which we can consistently think but not know through experience. Our knowledge and understanding of the empirical world, Kant argued, can only arise within the limits of our perceptual and cognitive powers. We should not assume, however, that we know all that may be true about “things in themselves,” although we lack the “intellectual intuition” that would be needed to learn about such things.

These distinctions, according to Kant, allow us to resolve the “antinomy” about free will by interpreting the “thesis” that free will is possible as about noumena and the “antithesis” that every event has a cause as about phenomena. Morality thus presupposes that agents, in an incomprehensible “intelligible world,” are able to make things happen by their own free choices in a “sensible world” in which causal determinism is true.

Many of Kant’s commentators, who are skeptical about these apparently exorbitant metaphysical claims, have attempted to make sense of his discussions of the intelligible and sensible worlds in less metaphysically demanding ways. On one interpretation (Hudson 1994), one and the same act can be described in wholly physical terms (as an appearance) and also in irreducibly mental terms (as a thing in itself). On this compatibilist picture, all acts are causally determined, but a free act is one that can be described as determined by irreducibly mental causes, and in particular by the causality of reason. A second interpretation holds that the intelligible and sensible worlds are used as metaphors for two ways of conceiving of one and the same world (Korsgaard 1996; Allison 1990; Hill 1989a, 1989b). When we are engaging in scientific or empirical investigations, we often take up a perspective in which we think of things as subject to natural causation, but when we deliberate, act, reason and judge, we often take up a different perspective, in which we think of ourselves and others as agents who are not determined by natural causes. When we take up this latter, practical, standpoint, we need not believe that we or others really are free, in any deep metaphysical sense; we need only operate “under the idea of freedom” (G 4:448). Controversy persists, however, about whether Kant’s conception of freedom requires a “two worlds” or “two perspectives” account of the sensible and intelligible worlds (Guyer 1987, 2009; Langton 2001; Kohl 2016; Wood 1984; Hogan 2009).

Although the two most basic aims Kant saw for moral philosophy are to seek out and establish the supreme principle of morality, they are not, in Kant’s view, its only aims. Moral philosophy, for Kant, is most fundamentally addressed to the first-person, deliberative question, “What ought I to do?”, and an answer to that question requires much more than delivering or justifying the fundamental principle of morality. We also need some account, based on this principle, of the nature and extent of the specific moral duties that apply to us. To this end, Kant employs his findings from the Groundwork in The Metaphysics of Morals , and offers a categorization of our basic moral duties to ourselves and others. In addition, Kant thought that moral philosophy should characterize and explain the demands that morality makes on human psychology and forms of human social interaction. These topics, among others, are addressed in central chapters of the second Critique , the Religion and again in the Metaphysics of Morals, and are perhaps given a sustained treatment in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View . Further, a satisfying answer to the question of what one ought to do would have to take into account any political and religious requirements there are. Each of these requirement turn out to be, indirectly at least, also moral obligations for Kant, and are discussed in the Metaphysics of Morals and in Religion . Finally, moral philosophy should say something about the ultimate end of human endeavor, the Highest Good, and its relationship to the moral life. In the Critique of Practical Reason , Kant argued that this Highest Good for humanity is complete moral virtue together with complete happiness, the former being the condition of our deserving the latter. Unfortunately, Kant noted, virtue does not ensure wellbeing and may even conflict with it. Further, he thought that there is no real possibility of moral perfection in this life and indeed few of us fully deserve the happiness we are lucky enough to enjoy. Reason cannot prove or disprove the existence of Divine Providence, on Kant’s view, nor the immortality of the soul, which seem necessary to rectify these things. Nevertheless, Kant argued, an unlimited amount of time to perfect ourselves (immortality) and a commensurate achievement of wellbeing (ensured by God) are “postulates” required by reason when employed in moral matters.

Throughout his moral works, Kant returns time and again to the question of the method moral philosophy should employ when pursuing these aims. A basic theme of these discussions is that the fundamental philosophical issues of morality must be addressed a priori , that is, without drawing on observations of human beings and their behavior. Kant’s insistence on an a priori method to seek out and establish fundamental moral principles, however, does not always appear to be matched by his own practice. The Metaphysics of Morals , for instance, is meant to be based on a priori rational principles, but many of the specific duties that Kant describes, along with some of the arguments he gives in support of them, rely on general facts about human beings and our circumstances that are known from experience.

In one sense, it might seem obvious why Kant insists on an a priori method. A “metaphysics of morals” would be, more or less, an account of the nature and structure of moral requirements — in effect, a categorization of duties and values. Such a project would address such questions as, What is a duty? What kinds of duties are there? What is the good? What kinds of goods are there?, and so on. These appear to be metaphysical questions. Any principle used to provide such categorizations appears to be a principle of metaphysics, in a sense, but Kant did not see them as external moral truths that exist independently of rational agents. Moral requirements, instead, are rational principles that tell us what we have overriding reason to do. Metaphysical principles of this sort are always sought out and established by a priori methods.

Perhaps something like this was behind Kant’s thinking. However, the considerations he offers for an a priori method do not all obviously draw on this sort of rationale. The following are three considerations favoring a priori methods that he emphasizes repeatedly.

The first is that, as Kant and others have conceived of it, ethics initially requires an analysis of our moral concepts. We must understand the concepts of a “good will”, “obligation”, “duty” and so on, as well as their logical relationships to one another, before we can determine whether our use of these concepts is justified. Given that the analysis of concepts is an a priori matter, to the degree that ethics consists of such an analysis, ethics is a priori as a well.

Of course, even were we to agree with Kant that ethics should begin with analysis, and that analysis is or should be an entirely a priori undertaking, this would not explain why all of the fundamental questions of moral philosophy must be pursued a priori . Indeed, one of the most important projects of moral philosophy, for Kant, is to show that we, as rational agents, are bound by moral requirements and that fully rational agents would necessarily comply with them. Kant admits that his analytical arguments for the CI are inadequate on their own because the most they can show is that the CI is the supreme principle of morality if there is such a principle . Kant must therefore address the possibility that morality itself is an illusion by showing that the CI really is an unconditional requirement of reason that applies to us. Even though Kant thought that this project of “establishing” the CI must also be carried out a priori , he did not think we could pursue this project simply by analyzing our moral concepts or examining the actual behavior of others. What is needed, instead, is a “synthetic”, but still a priori , kind of argument that starts from ideas of freedom and rational agency and critically examines the nature and limits of these capacities.

This is the second reason Kant held that fundamental issues in ethics must be addressed with an a priori method: The ultimate subject matter of ethics is the nature and content of the principles that necessarily determine a rational will.

Fundamental issues in moral philosophy must also be settled a priori because of the nature of moral requirements themselves, or so Kant thought. This is a third reason he gives for an a priori method, and it appears to have been of great importance to Kant: Moral requirements present themselves as being unconditionally necessary . But an a posteriori method seems ill-suited to discovering and establishing what we must do whether we feel like doing it or not; surely such a method could only tell us what we actually do. So an a posteriori method of seeking out and establishing the principle that generates such requirements will not support the presentation of moral “oughts” as unconditional necessities. Kant argued that empirical observations could only deliver conclusions about, for instance, the relative advantages of moral behavior in various circumstances or how pleasing it might be in our own eyes or the eyes of others. Such findings clearly would not support the unconditional necessity of moral requirements. To appeal to a posteriori considerations would thus result in a tainted conception of moral requirements. It would view them as demands for which compliance is not unconditionally necessary, but rather necessary only if additional considerations show it to be advantageous, optimific or in some other way felicitous. Thus, Kant argued that if moral philosophy is to guard against undermining the unconditional necessity of obligation in its analysis and defense of moral thought, it must be carried out entirely a priori .

Kant’s analysis of commonsense ideas begins with the thought that the only thing good without qualification is a “good will”. While the phrases “he’s good hearted”, “she’s good natured” and “she means well” are common, “the good will” as Kant thinks of it is not the same as any of these ordinary notions. The idea of a good will is closer to the idea of a “good person”, or, more archaically, a “person of good will”. This use of the term “will” early on in analyzing ordinary moral thought prefigures later and more technical discussions concerning the nature of rational agency. Nevertheless, this idea of a good will is an important commonsense touchstone to which Kant returns throughout his works. The basic idea, as Kant describes it in the Groundwork, is that what makes a good person good is his possession of a will that is in a certain way “determined” by, or makes its decisions on the basis of, whatever basic moral principles there may be. The idea of a good will is supposed to be the idea of one who is committed only to make decisions that she holds to be morally worthy and who takes moral considerations in themselves to be conclusive reasons for guiding her behavior. This sort of disposition or character is something we all highly value, Kant thought. He believes we value it without limitation or qualification. By this, we believe, he means primarily two things.

First, unlike anything else, there is no conceivable circumstance in which we regard our own moral goodness as worth forfeiting simply in order to obtain some desirable object. By contrast, the value of all other desirable qualities, such as courage or cleverness, can be diminished, forgone, or sacrificed under certain circumstances: Courage may be laid aside if it requires injustice, and it is better not to be witty if it requires cruelty. There is no implicit restriction or qualification to the effect that a commitment to give moral considerations decisive weight is worth honoring, but only under such and such circumstances .

Second, possessing and maintaining a steadfast commitment to moral principles is the very condition under which anything else is worth having or pursuing. Intelligence and even pleasure are worth having only on the condition that they do not require giving up one’s fundamental moral convictions. The value of a good will thus cannot be that it secures certain valuable ends, whether of our own or of others, since their value is entirely conditional on our possessing and maintaining a good will. Indeed, since a good will is good under any condition, its goodness must not depend on any particular conditions obtaining. Thus, Kant points out that a good will must then also be good in itself and not in virtue of its relationship to other things such as the agent’s own happiness, overall welfare or any other effects it may or may not produce A good will would still “shine like a jewel” even if it were “completely powerless to carry out its aims” (G 4:394).

In Kant’s terms, a good will is a will whose decisions are wholly determined by moral demands or, as he often refers to this, by the Moral Law. Human beings inevitably feel this Law as a constraint on their natural desires, which is why such Laws, as applied to human beings, are imperatives and duties. A human will in which the Moral Law is decisive is motivated by the thought of duty . A holy or divine will, if it exists, though good, would not be good because it is motivated by thoughts of duty because such a will does not have natural inclinations and so necessarily fulfills moral requirements without feeling constrained to do so. It is the presence of desires that could operate independently of moral demands that makes goodness in human beings a constraint, an essential element of the idea of “duty.” So in analyzing unqualified goodness as it occurs in imperfectly rational creatures such as ourselves, we are investigating the idea of being motivated by the thought that we are constrained to act in certain ways that we might not want to simply from the thought that we are morally required to do so.

Kant confirms this by comparing motivation by duty with other sorts of motives, in particular, with motives of self-interest, self-preservation, sympathy and happiness. He argues that a dutiful action from any of these motives, however praiseworthy it may be, does not express a good will. Assuming an action has moral worth only if it expresses a good will, such actions have no genuine “moral worth.” The conformity of one’s action to duty in such cases is only related by accident to morality. For instance, if one is motivated by happiness alone, then had conditions not conspired to align one’s duty with one’s own happiness one would not have done one’s duty. By contrast, were one to supplant any of these motivations with the motive of duty, the morality of the action would then express one’s determination to act dutifully out of respect for the moral law itself. Only then would the action have moral worth.

Kant’s views in this regard have understandably been the subject of much controversy. Many object that we do not think better of actions done for the sake of duty than actions performed out of emotional concern or sympathy for others, especially those things we do for friends and family. Worse, moral worth appears to require not only that one’s actions be motivated by duty, but also that no other motives, even love or friendship, cooperate. Yet Kant’s defenders have argued that his point is not that we do not admire or praise motivating concerns other than duty, only that from the point of view of someone deliberating about what to do, these concerns are not decisive in the way that considerations of moral duty are. What is crucial in actions that express a good will is that in conforming to duty a perfectly virtuous person always would, and so ideally we should, recognize and be moved by the thought that our conformity is morally obligatory. The motivational structure of the agent should be arranged so that she always treats considerations of duty as sufficient reasons for conforming to those requirements. In other words, we should have a firm commitment not to perform an action if it is morally forbidden and to perform an action if it is morally required. Having a good will, in this sense, is compatible with having feelings and emotions of various kinds, and even with aiming to cultivate some of them in order to counteract desires and inclinations that tempt us to immorality. Controversy persists, however, about whether Kant’s claims about the motive of duty go beyond this basic point (Timmermann 2007; Herman 1993; Wood 1998; Baron 1995).

Suppose for the sake of argument we agree with Kant. We now need to know what distinguishes the principle that lays down our duties from these other motivating principles, and so makes motivation by it the source of unqualified value.

According to Kant, what is singular about motivation by duty is that it consists of bare respect for the moral law. What naturally comes to mind is this: Duties are rules or laws of some sort combined with some sort of felt constraint or incentive on our choices, whether from external coercion by others or from our own powers of reason. For instance, the bylaws of a club lay down duties for its officers and enforce them with sanctions. City and state laws establish the duties of citizens and enforce them with coercive legal power. Thus, if we do something because it is our “civic” duty, or our duty “as a boy scout” or “a good American,” our motivation is respect for the code that makes it our duty. Thinking we are duty bound is simply respecting, as such, certain laws pertaining to us.

However intuitive, this cannot be all of Kant’s meaning. For one thing, as with the Jim Crow laws of the old South and the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany, the laws to which these types of “actions from duty” conform may be morally despicable. Respect for such laws could hardly be thought valuable. For another, our motive in conforming our actions to civic and other laws is rarely unconditional respect. We also have an eye toward doing our part in maintaining civil or social order, toward punishments or loss of standing and reputation in violating such laws, and other outcomes of lawful behavior. Indeed, we respect these laws to the degree, but only to the degree, that they do not violate values, laws or principles we hold more dear. Yet Kant thinks that, in acting from duty, we are not at all motivated by a prospective outcome or some other extrinsic feature of our conduct except insofar as these are requirements of duty itself. We are motivated by the mere conformity of our will to law as such.

To act out of respect for the moral law, in Kant’s view, is to be moved to act by a recognition that the moral law is a supremely authoritative standard that binds us and to experience a kind of feeling, which is akin to awe and fear, when we acknowledge the moral law as the source of moral requirements. Human persons inevitably have respect for the moral law even though we are not always moved by it and even though we do not always comply with the moral standards that we nonetheless recognize as authoritative.

Kant’s account of the content of moral requirements and the nature of moral reasoning is based on his analysis of the unique force moral considerations have as reasons to act. The force of moral requirements as reasons is that we cannot ignore them no matter how circumstances might conspire against any other consideration. Basic moral requirements retain their reason-giving force under any circumstance, they have universal validity. So, whatever else may be said of basic moral requirements, their content is universal. Only a universal law could be the content of a requirement that has the reason-giving force of morality. This brings Kant to a preliminary formulation of the CI: “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (G 4:402). This is the principle which motivates a good will, and which Kant holds to be the fundamental principle of all of morality.

Kant holds that the fundamental principle of our moral duties is a categorical imperative . It is an imperative because it is a command addressed to agents who could follow it but might not (e.g. , “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”). It is categorical in virtue of applying to us unconditionally, or simply because we possesses rational wills, without reference to any ends that we might or might not have. It does not, in other words, apply to us on the condition that we have antecedently adopted some goal for ourselves.

There are “oughts” other than our moral duties, according to Kant, but these oughts are distinguished from the moral ought in being based on a quite different kind of principle, one that is the source of hypothetical imperatives . A hypothetical imperative is a command that also applies to us in virtue of our having a rational will, but not simply in virtue of this. It requires us to exercise our wills in a certain way given we have antecedently willed an end. A hypothetical imperative is thus a command in a conditional form. But not any command in this form counts as a hypothetical imperative in Kant’s sense. For instance, “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!” is a conditional command. But the antecedent conditions under which the command “clap your hands” applies to you do not posit any end that you will, but consist rather of emotional and cognitive states you may or may not be in. Further, “if you want pastrami, try the corner deli” is also a command in conditional form, but strictly speaking it too fails to be a hypothetical imperative in Kant’s sense since this command does not apply to us in virtue of our willing some end, but only in virtue of our desiring or wanting an end. For Kant, willing an end involves more than desiring; it requires actively choosing or committing to the end rather than merely finding oneself with a passive desire for it. Further, there is nothing irrational in failing to will means to what one desires. An imperative that applied to us in virtue of our desiring some end would thus not be a hypothetical imperative of practical rationality in Kant’s sense.

The condition under which a hypothetical imperative applies to us, then, is that we will some end. Now, for the most part, the ends we will we might not have willed, and some ends that we do not will we might nevertheless have willed. But there is at least conceptual room for the idea of a natural or inclination-based end that we must will. The distinction between ends that we might or might not will and those, if any, we necessarily will as the kinds of natural beings we are, is the basis for his distinction between two kinds of hypothetical imperatives. Kant names these “problematic” and “assertoric”, based on how the end is willed. If the end is one that we might or might not will — that is, it is a merely possible end — the imperative is problematic. For instance, “Don’t ever take side with anyone against the Family.” is a problematic imperative, even if the end posited here is (apparently) one’s own continued existence. Almost all non-moral, rational imperatives are problematic, since there are virtually no ends that we necessarily will as human beings.

As it turns out, the only (non-moral) end that we will, as a matter of natural necessity, is our own happiness. Any imperative that applied to us because we will our own happiness would thus be an assertoric imperative. Rationality, Kant thinks, can issue no imperative if the end is indeterminate, and happiness is an indeterminate end. Although we can say for the most part that if one is to be happy, one should save for the future, take care of one’s health and nourish one’s relationships, these fail to be genuine commands in the strictest sense and so are instead mere “counsels.” Some people are happy without these, and whether you could be happy without them is, although doubtful, an open question.

Since Kant presents moral and prudential rational requirements as first and foremost demands on our wills rather than on external acts, moral and prudential evaluation is first and foremost an evaluation of the will our actions express. Thus, it is not an error of rationality to fail to take the necessary means to one’s (willed) ends, nor to fail to want to take the means; one only falls foul of non-moral practical reason if one fails to will the means. Likewise, while actions, feelings or desires may be the focus of other moral views, for Kant practical irrationality, both moral and prudential, focuses mainly on our willing.

One recent interpretive dispute (Hill 1973; Schroeder 2009; Rippon 2014) has been about whether hypothetical imperatives, in Kant’s view, have a “wide” or “narrow” scope. That is, do such imperatives tell us to take the necessary means to our ends or give up our ends (wide scope) or do they simply tell us that, if we have an end, then take the necessary means to it.

Kant describes the will as operating on the basis of subjective volitional principles he calls “maxims”. Hence, morality and other rational requirements are, for the most part, demands that apply to the maxims that we act on. . The form of a maxim is “I will A in C in order to realize or produce E ” where “ A ” is some act type, “ C ” is some type of circumstance, and “ E ” is some type of end to be realized or achieved by A in C. Since this is a principle stating only what some agent wills, it is subjective . (A principle that governs any rational will is an objective principle of volition, which Kant refers to as a practical law). For anything to count as human willing, it must be based on a maxim to pursue some end through some means. Hence, in employing a maxim, any human willing already embodies the form of means-end reasoning that calls for evaluation in terms of hypothetical imperatives. To that extent at least, then, anything dignified as human willing is subject to rational requirements.

Kant’s first formulation of the CI states that you are to “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (G 4:421). O’Neill (1975, 1989) and Rawls (1980, 1989), among others, take this formulation in effect to summarize a decision procedure for moral reasoning, and we will follow their basic outline: First, formulate a maxim that enshrines your proposed plan of action. Second, recast that maxim as a universal law of nature governing all rational agents, and so as holding that all must, by natural law, act as you yourself propose to act in these circumstances. Third, consider whether your maxim is even conceivable in a world governed by this new law of nature. If it is, then, fourth, ask yourself whether you would, or could, rationally will to act on your maxim in such a world. If you could, then your action is morally permissible.

If your maxim fails the third step, you have a “perfect” duty admitting “of no exception in favor of inclination” to refrain from acting on that maxim (G 4:421). If your maxim fails the fourth step, you have an “imperfect” duty requiring you to pursue a policy that can admit of such exceptions. If your maxim passes all four steps, only then is acting on it morally permissible. Following Hill (1971), we can understand the difference in duties as formal: Perfect duties come in the form “One must never (or always) φ to the fullest extent possible in C ”, while imperfect duties, since they require us to adopt an end, at least require that “One must sometimes and to some extent φ in C .” So, for instance, Kant held that the maxim of committing suicide to avoid future unhappiness did not pass the third step, the contradiction in conception test. Hence, one is forbidden to act on the maxim of committing suicide to avoid unhappiness. By contrast, the maxim of refusing to assist others in pursuit of their projects passes the contradiction in conception test, but fails the contradiction in the will test at the fourth step. Hence, we have a duty to sometimes and to some extent aid and assist others.

Kant held that ordinary moral thought recognized moral duties toward ourselves as well as toward others. Hence, together with the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, Kant recognized four categories of duties: perfect duties toward ourselves, perfect duties toward others, imperfect duties toward ourselves and imperfect duties toward others. Kant uses four examples in the Groundwork , one of each kind of duty, to demonstrate that every kind of duty can be derived from the CI, and hence to bolster his case that the CI is indeed the fundamental principle of morality. To refrain from suicide is a perfect duty toward oneself; to refrain from making promises you have no intention of keeping is a perfect duty toward others; to develop one’s talents is an imperfect duty toward oneself; and to contribute to the happiness of others is an imperfect duty toward others. Again, Kant’s interpreters differ over exactly how to reconstruct the derivation of these duties. We will briefly sketch one way of doing so for the perfect duty to others to refrain from lying promises and the imperfect duty to ourselves to develop talents.

Kant’s example of a perfect duty to others concerns a promise you might consider making but have no intention of keeping in order to get needed money. Naturally, being rational requires not contradicting oneself, but there is no self-contradiction in the maxim “I will make lying promises when it achieves something I want.” An immoral action clearly does not involve a self-contradiction in this sense (as would the maxim of finding a married bachelor). Kant’s position is that it is irrational to perform an action if that action’s maxim contradicts itself once made into a universal law of nature . The maxim of lying whenever it gets you what you want generates a contradiction once you try to combine it with the universalized version that all rational agents must, by a law of nature, lie when doing so gets them what they want.

Here is one way of seeing how this might work: If I conceive of a world in which everyone by nature must try to deceive people any time this will get them what they want, I am conceiving of a world in which no practice of giving one’s word could ever arise and, because this is a law of nature, we can assume that it is widely known that no such practice could exist. So I am conceiving of a world in which everyone knows that no practice of giving one’s word exists. My maxim, however, is to make a deceptive promise in order to get needed money. And it is a necessary means of doing this that a practice of taking the word of others exists, so that someone might take my word and I take advantage of their doing so. Thus, in trying to conceive of my maxim in a world in which no one ever takes anyone’s word in such circumstances, and knows this about one another, I am trying to conceive of this: A world in which no practice of giving one’s word exists, but also, at the very same time, a world in which just such a practice does exist, for me to make use of in my maxim. It is a world containing my promise and a world in which there can be no promises. Hence, it is inconceivable that I could sincerely act on my maxim in a world in which my maxim is a universal law of nature. Since it is inconceivable that these two things could exist together, I am forbidden ever to act on the maxim of lying to get money.

By contrast with the maxim of the lying promise, we can easily conceive of adopting a maxim of refusing to develop any of our talents in a world in which that maxim is a universal law of nature. It would undoubtedly be a world more primitive than our own, but pursuing such a policy is still conceivable in it. However, it is not, Kant argues, possible to rationally will this maxim in such a world. The argument for why this is so, however, is not obvious, and some of Kant’s thinking seems hardly convincing: Insofar as we are rational, he says, we already necessarily will that all of our talents and abilities be developed. Hence, although I can conceive of a talentless world, I cannot rationally will that it come about, given that I already will, insofar as I am rational, that I develop all of my own. Yet, given limitations on our time, energy and interest, it is difficult to see how full rationality requires us to aim to fully develop literally all of our talents. Indeed, it seems to require much less, a judicious picking and choosing among one’s abilities. Further, all that is required to show that I cannot will a talentless world is that, insofar as I am rational, I necessarily will that some talents in me be developed, not the dubious claim that I rationally will that they all be developed. Moreover, suppose rationality did require me to aim at developing all of my talents. Then, there seems to be no need to go further in the CI procedure to show that refusing to develop talents is immoral. Given that, insofar as we are rational, we must will to develop capacities, it is by this very fact irrational not to do so.

However, mere failure to conform to something we rationally will is not yet immorality. Failure to conform to instrumental principles, for instance, is irrational but not always immoral. In order to show that this maxim is categorically forbidden, one strategy is to make use of several other of Kant’s claims or assumptions.

First, we must accept Kant’s claim that, by “natural necessity,” we will our own happiness as an end (G 4:415). This is a claim he uses not only to distinguish assertoric from problematic imperatives, but also to argue for the imperfect duty of helping others (G 4:423) He also appears to rely on this claim in each of his examples. Each maxim he is testing appears to have happiness as its aim. One explanation for this is that, since each person necessarily wills her own happiness, maxims in pursuit of this goal will be the typical object of moral evaluation. This, at any rate, is clear in the talents example itself: The forbidden maxim adopted by the ne’er-do-well is supposed to be “devoting his life solely to…enjoyment” (G 4:423) rather than to developing his talents.

Second, we must assume, as also seems reasonable, that a necessary means to achieving (normal) human happiness is not only that we ourselves develop some talent, but also that others develop some capacities of theirs at some time. For instance, I cannot engage in the normal pursuits that make up my own happiness, such as playing piano, writing philosophy or eating delicious meals, unless I have developed some talents myself, and, moreover, someone else has made pianos and written music, taught me writing, harvested foods and developed traditions of their preparation.

Finally, Kant’s examples come on the heels of defending the position that rationality requires conformity to hypothetical imperatives. Thus, we should assume that, necessarily, rational agents will the necessary and available means to any ends that they will. And once we add this to the assumptions that we must will our own happiness as an end, and that developed talents are necessary means to achieving that end, it follows that we cannot rationally will that a world come about in which it is a law that no one ever develops any of their natural talents. We cannot do so, because our own happiness is the very end contained in the maxim of giving ourselves over to pleasure rather than self-development. Since we will the necessary and available means to our ends, we are rationally committed to willing that everyone sometime develop his or her talents. So since we cannot will as a universal law of nature that no one ever develop any talents — given that it is inconsistent with what we now see that we rationally will — we are forbidden from adopting the maxim of refusing to develop any of our own.

Most philosophers who find Kant’s views attractive find them so because of the Humanity Formulation of the CI. This formulation states that we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. This is often seen as introducing the idea of “respect” for persons, for whatever it is that is essential to our humanity. Kant was clearly right that this and the other formulations bring the CI “closer to intuition” than the Universal Law formula. Intuitively, there seems something wrong with treating human beings as mere instruments with no value beyond this. But this very intuitiveness can also invite misunderstandings.

First, the Humanity Formula does not rule out using people as means to our ends. Clearly this would be an absurd demand, since we apparently do this all the time in morally appropriate ways. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any life that is recognizably human without the use of others in pursuit of our goals. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the chairs we sit on and the computers we type at are gotten only by way of talents and abilities that have been developed through the exercise of the wills of many people. What the Humanity Formula rules out is engaging in this pervasive use of humanity in such a way that we treat it as a mere means to our ends. Thus, the difference between a horse and a taxi driver is not that we may use one but not the other as a means of transportation. Unlike a horse, the taxi driver’s humanity must at the same time be treated as an end in itself.

Second, it is not human beings per se but the “humanity” in human beings that we must treat as an end in itself. Our “humanity” is that collection of features that make us distinctively human, and these include capacities to engage in self-directed rational behavior and to adopt and pursue our own ends, and any other rational capacities necessarily connected with these. Thus, supposing that the taxi driver has freely exercised his rational capacities in pursuing his line of work, we make permissible use of these capacities as a means only if we behave in a way that he could, when exercising his rational capacities, consent to — for instance, by paying an agreed on price.

Third, the idea of an end has three senses for Kant, two positive senses and a negative sense. An end in the first positive sense is a thing we will to produce or bring about in the world. For instance, if losing weight is my end, then losing weight is something I aim to bring about. An end in this sense guides my actions in that once I will to produce something, I then deliberate about and aim to pursue means of producing it if I am rational. Humanity is not an “end” in this sense, though even in this case, the end “lays down a law” for me. Once I have adopted an end in this sense, it dictates that I do something: I should act in ways that will bring about the end or instead choose to abandon my goal.

An end in the negative sense lays down a law for me as well, and so guides action, but in a different way. Korsgaard (1996) offers self-preservation as an example of an end in a negative sense: We do not try to produce our self-preservation. Rather, the end of self-preservation prevents us from engaging in certain kinds of activities, for instance, picking fights with mobsters, and so on. That is, as an end, it is something I do not act against in pursuing my positive ends, rather than something I produce.

Humanity is in the first instance an end in this negative sense: It is something that limits what I may do in pursuit of my other ends, similar to the way that my end of self-preservation limits what I may do in pursuit of other ends. Insofar as it limits my actions, it is a source of perfect duties. Now many of our ends are subjective in that they are not ends that every rational being must have. Humanity is an objective end, because it is an end that every rational being must have. Hence, my own humanity as well as the humanity of others limit what I am morally permitted to do when I pursue my other, non-mandatory, ends.

The humanity in myself and others is also a positive end, though not in the first positive sense above, as something to be produced by my actions. Rather, it is something to realize, cultivate or further by my actions. Becoming a philosopher, pianist or novelist might be my end in this sense. When my end is becoming a pianist, my actions do not, or at least not simply, produce something, being a pianist, but constitute or realize the activity of being a pianist. Insofar as the humanity in ourselves must be treated as an end in itself in this second positive sense, it must be cultivated, developed or fully actualized. Hence, the humanity in oneself is the source of a duty to develop one’s talents or to “perfect” one’s humanity. When one makes one’s own humanity one’s end, one pursues its development, much as when one makes becoming a pianist one’s end, one pursues the development of piano playing. And insofar as humanity is a positive end in others, I must attempt to further their ends as well. In so doing, I further the humanity in others, by helping further the projects and ends that they have willingly adopted for themselves. It is this sense of humanity as an end-in-itself on which some of Kant’s arguments for imperfect duties rely.

Finally, Kant’s Humanity Formula requires “respect” for the humanity in persons. Proper regard for something with absolute value or worth requires respect for it. But this can invite misunderstandings. One way in which we respect persons, termed “appraisal respect” by Stephen Darwall (1977), is clearly not the same as the kind of respect required by the Humanity Formula: I may respect you as a rebounder but not a scorer, or as a researcher but not as a teacher. When I respect you in this way, I am positively appraising you in light of some achievement or virtue you possess relative to some standard of success. If this were the sort of respect Kant is counseling then clearly it may vary from person to person and is surely not what treating something as an end-in-itself requires. For instance, it does not seem to prevent me from regarding rationality as an achievement and respecting one person as a rational agent in this sense, but not another. And Kant is not telling us to ignore differences, to pretend that we are blind to them on mindless egalitarian grounds. However, a distinct way in which we respect persons, referred to as “recognition respect” by Darwall, better captures Kant’s position: I may respect you because you are a student, a Dean, a doctor or a mother. In such cases of respecting you because of who or what you are, I am giving the proper regard to a certain fact about you, your being a Dean for instance. This sort of respect, unlike appraisal respect, is not a matter of degree based on your having measured up to some standard of assessment. Respect for the humanity in persons is more like Darwall’s recognition respect. We are to respect human beings simply because they are persons and this requires a certain sort of regard. We are not called on to respect them insofar as they have met some standard of evaluation appropriate to persons. And, crucially for Kant, persons cannot lose their humanity by their misdeeds – even the most vicious persons, Kant thought, deserve basic respect as persons with humanity.

The third formulation of the CI is “the Idea of the will of every rational being as a will that legislates universal law .” (G 4:432). Although Kant does not state this as an imperative, as he does in the other formulations, it is easy enough to put it in that form: Act so that through your maxims you could be a legislator of universal laws. This sounds very similar to the first formulation. However, in this case we focus on our status as universal law givers rather than universal law followers . This is of course the source of the very dignity of humanity Kant speaks of in the second formulation. A rational will that is merely bound by universal laws could act accordingly from natural and non-moral motives, such as self-interest. But in order to be a legislator of universal laws, such contingent motives, motives that rational agents such as ourselves may or may not have, must be set aside. Hence, we are required, according to this formulation, to conform our behavior to principles that express this autonomy of the rational will — its status as a source of the very universal laws that obligate it. As with the Humanity Formula, this new formulation of the CI does not change the outcome, since each is supposed to formulate the very same moral law, and in some sense “unite” the other formulations within it. Kant takes each formulation that succeeds the first in its own way as bringing the moral law “closer to feeling”. The Autonomy Formula presumably does this by putting on display the source of our dignity and worth, our status as free rational agents who are the source of the authority behind the very moral laws that bind us.

This formulation has gained favor among Kantians in recent years (see Rawls, 1971; Hill, 1972). Many see it as introducing more of a social dimension to Kantian morality. Kant states that the above concept of every rational will as a will that must regard itself as enacting laws binding all rational wills is closely connected to another concept, that of a “systematic union of different rational beings under common laws”, or a “Kingdom of Ends” (G 4:433). The formulation of the CI states that we must “act in accordance with the maxims of a member giving universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends” (G 4:439). It combines the others in that (i) it requires that we conform our actions to the laws of an ideal moral legislature, (ii) that this legislature lays down universal laws, binding all rational wills including our own, and (iii) that those laws are of “a merely possible kingdom” each of whose members equally possesses this status as legislator of universal laws, and hence must be treated always as an end in itself. The intuitive idea behind this formulation is that our fundamental moral obligation is to act only on principles which could earn acceptance by a community of fully rational agents each of whom have an equal share in legislating these principles for their community.

Kant claimed that all of these CI formulas were equivalent. Unfortunately, he does not say in what sense. What he says is that these “are basically only so many formulations of precisely the same law, each one of them by itself uniting the other two within it,” and that the differences between them are “more subjectively than objectively practical” in the sense that each aims “to bring an Idea of reason closer to intuition (by means of a certain analogy) and thus nearer to feeling” (G 4:435). He also says that one formula “follows from” another (G 4:431), and that the concept foundational to one formula “leads to a closely connected” concept at the basis of another formula (G 4:433). Thus, his claim that the formulations are equivalent could be interpreted in a number of ways.

Kant’s statement that each formula “unites the other two within it” initially suggests that the formulas are equivalent in meaning , or at least one could analytically derive one formula from another. Some of Kant’s commentators, for example, have argued along the following lines: That I should always treat humanity as an end in itself entails that I should act only on maxims that are consistent with themselves as universal laws of nature (O’Neill 1975, 1990; Engstrom 2009; Sensen 2011). There are remaining doubts some commentators have, however, about whether this strategy can capture the full meaning of the Humanity Formula or explain all of the duties that Kant claims to derive from it (Wood 1999, 2007; Cureton 2013).

Perhaps, then, if the formulas are not equivalent in meaning, they are nevertheless logically interderivable and hence equivalent in this sense. The universal law formula is not itself derived, as some of Kant’s interpreters have suggested, from the principle of non-contradiction. That would have the consequence that the CI is a logical truth, and Kant insists that it is not or at least that it is not analytic. Since the CI formulas are not logical truths, then, it is possible that they could be logically interderivable. However, despite his claim that each contains the others within it, what we find in the Groundwork seems best interpreted as a derivation of each successive formula from the immediately preceding formula. There are, nonetheless, a few places in which it seems that Kant is trying to work in the opposite direction. One is found in his discussion of the Humanity Formula. There Kant says that only something “ whose existence in itself had an absolute worth” could be the ground of a categorically binding law (G 4:428). He then boldly proclaims that humanity is this absolutely valuable thing, referring to this as a “postulate” that he will argue for in the final chapter of the Groundwork (G 4:429n). One might take this as expressing Kant’s intention to derive thereby the universal law formula from the Humanity Formula: If something is absolutely valuable, then we must act only on maxims that can be universal laws. But (he postulates) humanity is absolutely valuable. Thus , we must act only on maxims that can be universal laws. This (we think) anomalous discussion may well get at some deep sense in which Kant thought the formulations were equivalent. Nonetheless, this derivation of the universal law formulation from the Humanity Formulation seems to require a substantive, synthetic claim, namely, that humanity is indeed absolutely valuable. And if it does require this, then, contrary to Kant’s own insistence, the argument of Groundwork II does not appear to be merely an analytic argument meant simply to establish the content of the moral law.

The most straightforward interpretation of the claim that the formulas are equivalent is as the claim that following or applying each formula would generate all and only the same duties (Allison 2011). This seems to be supported by the fact that Kant used the same examples through the Law of Nature Formula and the Humanity Formula. Thus, the Universal Law Formulation generates a duty to φ if and only if the Humanity Formula generates a duty to φ, (and so on for the other formulations). In other words, respect for humanity as an end in itself could never lead you to act on maxims that would generate a contradiction when universalized, and vice versa. This way of understanding Kant’s claim also fits with his statement that there is no “objective practical difference” between the formulations although there are “subjective” differences. The subjective differences between formulas are presumably differences that appeal in different ways to various conceptions of what morality demands of us. But this difference in meaning is compatible with there being no practical difference, in the sense that conformity to one formulation cannot lead one to violate another formulation.

At the heart of Kant’s moral theory is the idea of autonomy. Most readers interpret Kant as holding that autonomy is a property of rational wills or agents. Understanding the idea of autonomy was, in Kant’s view, key to understanding and justifying the authority that moral requirements have over us. As with Rousseau, whose views influenced Kant, freedom does not consist in being bound by no law, but by laws that are in some sense of one’s own making. The idea of freedom as autonomy thus goes beyond the merely “negative” sense of being free from causes on our conduct originating outside of ourselves. It contains first and foremost the idea of laws made and laid down by oneself, and, in virtue of this, laws that have decisive authority over oneself.

Kant’s basic idea can be grasped intuitively by analogy with the idea of political freedom as autonomy (See Reath 1994). Consider how political freedom in liberal theories is thought to be related to legitimate political authority: A state is free when its citizens are bound only by laws in some sense of their own making — created and put into effect, say, by vote or by elected representatives. The laws of that state then express the will of the citizens who are bound by them. The idea, then, is that the source of legitimate political authority is not external to its citizens, but internal to them, internal to “the will of the people.” It is because the body politic created and enacted these laws for itself that it can be bound by them. An autonomous state is thus one in which the authority of its laws is in the will of the people in that state, rather than in the will of a people external to that state, as when one state imposes laws on another during occupation or colonization. In the latter case, the laws have no legitimate authority over those citizens. In a similar fashion, we may think of a person as free when bound only by her own will and not by the will of another. Her actions then express her own will and not the will of someone or something else. The authority of the principles binding her will is then also not external to her will. It comes from the fact that she willed them. So autonomy, when applied to an individual, ensures that the source of the authority of the principles that bind her is in her own will. Kant’s view can be seen as the view that the moral law is just such a principle. Hence, the “moral legitimacy” of the CI is grounded in its being an expression of each person’s own rational will. It is because each person’s own reason is the legislator and executor of the moral law that it is authoritative for her. (For a contrasting interpretation of autonomy that emphasizes the intrinsic value of freedom of choice and the instrumental role of reason in preserving that value, see Guyer 2007).

Kant argues that the idea of an autonomous will emerges from a consideration of the idea of a will that is free “in a negative sense.” The concept of a rational will is of a will that operates by responding to what it takes to be reasons. This is, firstly, the concept of a will that does not operate through the influence of factors outside of this responsiveness to apparent reasons. For a will to be free is thus for it to be physically and psychologically unforced in its operation. Hence, behaviors that are performed because of obsessions or thought disorders are not free in this negative sense. But also, for Kant, a will that operates by being determined through the operation of natural laws, such as those of biology or psychology, cannot be thought of as operating by responding to reasons. Hence, determination by natural laws is conceptually incompatible with being free in a negative sense.

A crucial move in Kant’s argument is his claim that a rational will cannot act except “under the Idea” of its own freedom (G 4:448). The expression “acting under the Idea of freedom” is easy to misunderstand. It does not mean that a rational will must believe it is free, since determinists are as free as libertarians in Kant’s view. Indeed, Kant goes out of his way in his most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason , to argue that we have no rational basis for believing our wills to be free. This would involve, he argues, attributing a property to our wills that they would have to have as ‘things in themselves’ apart from the causally determined world of appearances. Of such things, he insists, we can have no knowledge. For much the same reason, Kant is not claiming that a rational will cannot operate without feeling free. Feelings, even the feeling of operating freely or the “looseness” Hume refers to when we act, cannot be used in an a priori argument to establish the CI, since they are empirical data.

One helpful way to understand acting “under the Idea of freedom” is by analogy with acting “under the Idea” that there are purposes in nature: Although there is, according to Kant, no rational basis for the belief that the natural world is (or is not) arranged according to some purpose by a Designer, the actual practices of science often require looking for the purpose of this or that chemical, organ, creature, environment, and so on. Thus, one engages in these natural sciences by searching for purposes in nature. Yet when an evolutionary biologist, for instance, looks for the purpose of some organ in some creature, she does not after all thereby believe that the creature was designed that way, for instance, by a Deity. Nor is she having some feeling of “designedness” in the creature. To say that she “acts under the Idea of” design is to say something about the practice of biology: Practicing biology involves searching for the purposes of the parts of living organisms. In much the same way, although there is no rational justification for the belief that our wills are (or are not) free, the actual practice of practical deliberation and decision consists of a search for the right causal chain of which to be the origin — consists, that is, seeking to be the first causes of things, wholly and completely through the exercise of one’s own will.

Kant says that a will that cannot exercise itself except under the Idea of its freedom is free from a practical point of view ( im practischer Absicht ). In saying such wills are free from a practical point of view, he is saying that in engaging in practical endeavors — trying to decide what to do, what to hold oneself and others responsible for, and so on — one is justified in holding oneself to all of the principles to which one would be justified in holding wills that are autonomous free wills. Thus, once we have established the set of prescriptions, rules, laws and directives that would bind an autonomous free will, we then hold ourselves to this very same of set prescriptions, rules, laws and directives. And one is justified in this because rational agency can only operate by seeking to be the first cause of its actions, and these are the prescriptions, and so on, of being a first cause of action. Therefore, rational agents are free in a negative sense insofar as any practical matter is at issue.

Crucially, rational wills that are negatively free must be autonomous, or so Kant argues. This is because the will is a kind of cause—willing causes action. Kant took from Hume the idea that causation implies universal regularities: if x causes y , then there is some universally valid law connecting X s to Y s. So, if my will is the cause of my φing, then Φing is connected to the sort of willing I engage in by some universal law. But it can’t be a natural law, such as a psychological, physical, chemical or biological law. These laws, which Kant thought were universal too, govern the movements of my body, the workings of my brain and nervous system and the operation of my environment and its effects on me as a material being. But they cannot be the laws governing the operation of my will; that, Kant already argued, is inconsistent with the freedom of my will in a negative sense. So, the will operates according to a universal law, though not one authored by nature, but one of which I am the origin or author. And that is to say that, in viewing my willing to φ as a negatively free cause of my φing, I must view my will as the autonomous cause of my having φed, as causing my having φed by way of some law that I, insofar as I am a rational will, laid down for my will.

Thus, Kant argues, a rational will, insofar as it is rational, is a will conforming itself to those laws valid for any rational will. Addressed to imperfectly rational wills, such as our own, this becomes an imperative: “Conform your action to a universal non-natural law.” Kant assumed that there was some connection between this formal requirement and the formulation of the CI which enjoins us to “Act as though the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.” But, as commentators have long noticed (see, e.g. , Hill, 1989a, 1989b), it is not clear what the link is between the claim that rational autonomous wills conform themselves to whatever universally valid laws require, and the more substantial and controversial claim that you should evaluate your maxims in the ways implied by the universal law of nature formulation.

Kant appeared not to recognize the gap between the law of an autonomous rational will and the CI, but he was apparently unsatisfied with the argument establishing the CI in Groundwork III for another reason, namely, the fact that it does not prove that we really are free. In the Critique of Practical Reason , he states that it is simply a “fact of reason” ( Factum der Vernunft ) that our wills are bound by the CI, and he uses this to argue that our wills are autonomous. Hence, while in the Groundwork Kant relies on a dubious argument for our autonomy to establish that we are bound by the moral law, in the second Critique , he argues from the bold assertion of our being bound by the moral law to our autonomy.

The apparent failure of Kant’s argument to establish the autonomy of the will, and hence the authority of moral demands over us, has not deterred his followers from trying to make good on this project. One strategy favored recently has been to turn back to the arguments of Groundwork II for help. Kant himself repeatedly claimed that these arguments are merely analytic but that they do not establish that there is anything that answers to the concepts he analyzes. The conclusions are thus fully compatible with morality being, as he puts it, a “mere phantom of the brain” (G 4:445). Kant clearly takes himself to have established that rational agents such as ourselves must take the means to our ends, since this is analytic of rational agency. But there is a chasm between this analytic claim and the supposed synthetic conclusion that rational agency also requires conforming to a further, non-desire based, principle of practical reason such as the CI. Nevertheless, some see arguments in Groundwork II that establish just this. These strategies involve a new “teleological” reading of Kant’s ethics that relies on establishing the existence of an absolute value or an “end in itself” (we say more about this teleological reading below). They begin with Kant’s own stated assumption that there is such an end in itself if and only if there is a categorical imperative binding on all rational agents as such. If this assumption is true, then if one can on independent grounds prove that there is something which is an end in itself, one will have an argument for a categorical imperative. One such strategy, favored by Korsgaard (1996) and Wood (1999) relies on the apparent argument Kant gives that humanity is an end in itself. Guyer, by contrast, sees an argument for freedom as an end in itself (Guyer 2000). Both strategies have faced textual and philosophical hurdles. Considerable interpretive finesse, for instance, is required to explain Kant’s stark insistence on the priority of principles and law over the good in the second Critique (CPrR 5:57–67)

Although most of Kant’s readers understand the property of autonomy as being a property of rational wills, some, such as Thomas E. Hill, have held that Kant’s central idea is that of autonomy is a property, not primarily of wills, but of principles. The core idea is that Kant believed that all moral theories prior to his own went astray because they portrayed fundamental moral principles as appealing to the existing interests of those bound by them. By contrast, in Kant’s view moral principles must not appeal to such interests, for no interest is necessarily universal. Thus, in assuming at the outset that moral principles must embody some interest (or “heteronomous” principles), such theories rule out the very possibility that morality is universally binding. By contrast, the Categorical Imperative, because it does not enshrine existing interests, presumes that rational agents can conform to a principle that does not appeal to their interests (or an “autonomous” principle), and so can fully ground our conception, according to Kant, of what morality requires of us.

A different interpretive strategy, which has gained prominence in recent years, focuses on Kant’s apparent identification, in Groundwork III, of the will and practical reason. One natural way of interpreting Kant’s conception of freedom is to understand it in terms of the freedom and spontaneity of reason itself. This in turn apparently implies that our wills are necessarily aimed at what is rational and reasonable. To will something, on this picture, is to govern oneself in accordance with reason. Often, however, we fail to effectively so govern ourselves because we are imperfect rational beings who are caused to act by our non–rational desires and inclinations. The result, at least on one version of this interpretation (Wolff 1973), is that we either act rationally and reasonably (and so autonomously) or we are merely caused to behave in certain ways by non–rational forces acting on us (and so heteronomously). This is, however, an implausible view. It implies that all irrational acts, and hence all immoral acts, are not willed and therefore not free. Most interpreters have denied that this is the proper interpretation of Kant’s views. However, several prominent commentators nonetheless think that there is some truth in it (Engstrom 2009; Reath 2015; Korsgaard 1996, 2008, 2009). They agree that we always act under the “guise of the good” in the sense that our will is necessarily aimed at what is objectively and subjectively rational and reasonable, but these interpreters also think that, for Kant, there is a middle–ground between perfect conformity to reason and being caused to act by natural forces. In particular, when we act immorally, we are either weak–willed or we are misusing our practical reason by willing badly. We do not have the capacity to aim to act on an immoral maxim because the will is identified with practical reason, so when we will to perform an immoral act, we implicitly but mistakenly take our underlying policy to be required by reason. By representing our immoral act as rational and reasonable, we are not exercising our powers of reason well, so we are simply making a “choice” that is contrary to reason without “willing” it as such. Our choice is nonetheless free and attributable to us because our will was involved in leading us to take the act to be rational and reasonable. It remains to be seen whether, on this complicated interpretation of Kant, it sufficiently allows for the possibility that one can knowingly and willingly do wrong if the will is practical reason and practical reason is, in part, the moral law.

Several recent discussions of Kant’s moral theory have focused on understanding and assessing its implications for how we should regard and treat people with various kinds of disabilities. Kant does not say much explicitly about those with disabilities, but his moral framework is often seen as both hostile to and supportive of the interests of disabled people.

One of the most important criticisms of Kant’s moral theory concerns human beings with severe cognitive disabilities who lack the moral capacities and dispositions that, according to Kant, are needed for people to have dignity, be ends in themselves, possess moral rights, legislate moral laws, be a member of the kingdom of ends, or otherwise have basic moral status (Kittay 2005, Vorhaus 2020, Barclay 2020; cf. the SEP entry cognitive disability and moral status ). When we reflect on what makes us morally special, according to Kant, we find that it is not our contingent properties, the biological species we belong to, or even our capacity to be conscious or to feel pain. Kant argues that rational nature, specifically the moral capacities and dispositions to legislate and follow moral principles, is what gives us inner worth and makes us deserving of respect (G 4:428–36, 446–7; Rel 6:26). Our basic moral status does not come in degrees. It is always equal to that of other people regardless of the level, if any, at which our moral capacities and dispositions are developed, realized, or exercised. Infants and young children, according to Kant, almost always have a moral nature even though their moral capacities and dispositions are undeveloped or underdeveloped (MM 6:280–1, 422; see also Schapiro 1999). Virtually all people with Down Syndrome and autism have basic moral status even if their moral capacities and dispositions are not as fully realized or exercised as they are in other people. Being asleep or in a coma does not preclude someone from having basic moral status even if their moral capacities and dispositions are temporarily or permanently dormant. Some human beings with significant cognitive disabilities, however, do not have even bare capacities or dispositions to recognize, accept, legislate, and follow moral norms. Kant seems to imply that anencephalic infants, those in persistent vegetative states, and other human beings with the most severe cognitive disabilities lack dignity and are not ends in themselves. They are apparently excluded from the moral community in ways that have unacceptable implications for how we should or should not regard and treat them.

There is little or no evidence that Kant himself thought about this problem, which is also connected with the moral status of many non-human animals who seem to matter morally but who lack the moral capacities and dispositions that, according to Kant, are necessary for basic moral status. Kant’s defenders have nonetheless explored what his basic moral framework might imply about the moral status of those with severe cognitive disabilities. One approach is simply to bite the bullet by admitting that people with certain severe cognitive disabilities lack the basic moral status that others of us share (Wood 1998, Sussman 2001. (This general strategy is deployed by Regan and followed by Wood, McMahan, Warren, Merkel, and others. For the claim that such humans are not persons, on Kant’s theory, see also Sussman, Idea , 242.) Proponents of this view can emphasize that, although we do not have duties to such people, we can have duties regarding them, such as duties of moral self-improvement that give us reasons to treat those with significant cognitive disabilities humanely for the sake of improving how we treat other human beings with basic moral status (MM 6:442) or duties of beneficence that give us reasons to care for them as a kindness to their families (G 4:430). Pragmatic considerations might also give us reasons to err on the side of caution when it comes to assessing whether someone entirely lacks the moral capacities and dispositions that ground basic moral status. Because of difficulties making such determinations and the moral risks involved in judging incorrectly, we should perhaps assume, unless we have very strong evidence to the contrary, that each human being has basic moral status (Korsgaard 1996).

A second approach to addressing the problem of moral status for those with significant cognitive disabilities is to emphasize passages in which Kant says all human beings have dignity or are ends in themselves (G 4:428–29; MM 6:410) and to argue that, according to Kant’s theories of biology and psychology, all human beings, including those with severe cognitive disabilities, necessarily have the requisite features of moral personhood (Kain 2009). A third approach is to draw on and perhaps supplement some of Kant’s moral views by, for example, arguing that because we value things, we must value ourselves as ends, which in turn commits us to valuing all human and non-human animals as ends (Korsgaard 2020) or that respect for all human beings is a constitutive feature of rational agency that does not depend on any intrinsic properties of the objects of respect (Sensen 2018).

In addition to discussing the moral status of people with severe cognitive disabilities, Kantian philosophers have also been exploring how his moral theory applies to other moral issues that concern how we should regard and treat people with disabilities. Although Kant’s focus was on specifying principles for all circumstances or for all human contexts, he recognized that a complete specification of his system of moral duties, ends, and ideals must include applications of basic moral standards to particular contexts and groups of people (MM 6:468–9).

When prospective parents choose not to produce children that would likely have disabilities, they might express disrespectful attitudes about existing people with disabilities (Velleman 2015, Sussman 2018). People with disabilities are often ridiculed, abused, treated as children, denied opportunities to continue developing their natural abilities in, for example, assisted living facilities that instead emphasize their comfort, and excluded from friendships or other forms of solidarity in ways that arguably violate moral duties that Kant describes (Cureton 2021, Hill 2020). They often face obstacles to developing and maintaining self-respect by those who regard them as, for example, burdensome, malingering, or curiosities (Stohr 2018). People with disabilities also tend to receive assistance from others that is incompatible with the respect they are owed. Beneficence, according to Kant, must be tempered by respect so that we do not, for example, impose burdensome obligations of gratitude on a blind person who would rather navigate to the next conference session herself, “help” a Deaf person by offering to pay for cochlear implants that he does not want, finish the sentences of someone with a speech impediment in ways that express condescension or pity, or mistake a strict duty to install a wheelchair ramp as an optional duty of charity (Cureton 2016, Holtman 2018).

Kant defines virtue as “the moral strength of a human being’s will in fulfilling his duty” (MM 6:405) and vice as principled immorality (MM 6:390). This definition appears to put Kant’s views on virtue at odds with classical views such as Aristotle’s in several important respects.

First, Kant’s account of virtue presupposes an account of moral duty already in place. Thus, rather than treating admirable character traits as more basic than the notions of right and wrong conduct, Kant takes virtues to be explicable only in terms of a prior account of moral or dutiful behavior. He does not try to make out what shape a good character has and then draw conclusions about how we ought to act on that basis. He sets out the principles of moral conduct based on his philosophical account of rational agency, and then on that basis defines virtue as a kind of strength and resolve to act on those principles despite temptations to the contrary.

Second, virtue is, for Kant, strength of will, and hence does not arise as the result of instilling a “second nature” by a process of habituating or training ourselves to act and feel in particular ways. It is indeed a disposition, but a disposition of one’s will, not a disposition of emotions, feelings, desires or any other feature of human nature that might be amenable to habituation. Moreover, the disposition is to overcome obstacles to moral behavior that Kant thought were ineradicable features of human nature. Thus, virtue appears to be much more like what Aristotle would have thought of as a lesser trait, viz., continence or self-control.

Third, in viewing virtue as a trait grounded in moral principles, and vice as principled transgression of moral law, Kant thought of himself as thoroughly rejecting what he took to be the Aristotelian view that virtue is a mean between two vices. The Aristotelian view, he claimed, assumes that virtue typically differs from vice only in terms of degree rather than in terms of the different principles each involves (MM 6:404, 432). Prodigality and avarice, for instance, do not differ by being too loose or not loose enough with one’s means. They differ in that the prodigal person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of enjoyment, while the avaricious person acts on the principle of acquiring means with the sole intention of possessing them.

Fourth, in classical views the distinction between moral and non-moral virtues is not particularly significant. A virtue is some sort of excellence of the soul, but one finds classical theorists treating wit and friendliness alongside courage and justice. Since Kant holds moral virtue to be a trait grounded in moral principle, the boundary between non-moral and moral virtues could not be more sharp. Even so, Kant shows a remarkable interest in non-moral virtues; indeed, much of Anthropology is given over to discussing the nature and sources of a variety of character traits, both moral and non-moral.

Fifth, virtue cannot be a trait of divine beings, if there are such, since it is the power to overcome obstacles that would not be present in them. This is not to say that to be virtuous is to be the victor in a constant and permanent war with ineradicable evil impulses or temptations. Morality is “duty” for human beings because it is possible (and we recognize that it is possible) for our desires and interests to run counter to its demands. Should all of our desires and interests be trained ever so carefully to comport with what morality actually requires of us, this would not change in the least the fact that morality is still duty for us. For should this come to pass, it would not change the fact that each and every desire and interest could have run contrary to the moral law. And it is the fact that they can conflict with moral law, not the fact that they actually do conflict with it, that makes duty a constraint, and hence is virtue essentially a trait concerned with constraint.

Sixth, virtue, while important, does not hold pride of place in Kant’s system in other respects. For instance, he holds that the lack of virtue is compatible with possessing a good will (G 6: 408). That one acts from duty, even repeatedly and reliably can thus be quite compatible with an absence of the moral strength to overcome contrary interests and desires. Indeed, it may often be no challenge at all to do one’s duty from duty alone. Someone with a good will, who is genuinely committed to duty for its own sake, might simply fail to encounter any significant temptation that would reveal the lack of strength to follow through with that commitment. That said, he also appeared to hold that if an act is to be of genuine moral worth, it must be motivated by the kind of purity of motivation achievable only through a permanent, quasi-religious conversion or “revolution” in the orientation of the will of the sort described in Religion . Until one achieves a permanent change in the will’s orientation in this respect, a revolution in which moral righteousness is the nonnegotiable condition of any of one’s pursuits, all of one’s actions that are in accordance with duty are nevertheless morally worthless, no matter what else may be said of them. However, even this revolution in the will must be followed up with a gradual, lifelong strengthening of one’s will to put this revolution into practice. This suggests that Kant’s considered view is that a good will is a will in which this revolution of priorities has been achieved, while a virtuous will is one with the strength to overcome obstacles to its manifestation in practice.

Kant distinguishes between virtue, which is strength of will to do one’s duty from duty, and particular virtues, which are commitments to particular moral ends that we are morally required to adopt. Among the virtues Kant discusses are those of self-respect, honesty, thrift, self-improvement, beneficence, gratitude, sociability, and forgiveness. Kant also distinguishes vice, which is a steadfast commitment to immorality, from particular vices, which involve refusing to adopt specific moral ends or committing to act against those ends. For example, malice, lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, vengefulness, envy, servility, contempt and arrogance are all vices in Kant’s normative ethical theory.

(Interest in Kant’s conception of virtue has rapidly grown in recent years. For further discussion, see Cureton and Hill 2014, forthcoming; Wood 2008; Surprenant 2014; Sherman 1997; O’Neil 1996; Johnson 2008; Hill 2012; Herman 1996; Engstrom 2002; Denis 2006; Cureton forthcoming; Betzler 2008; Baxley 2010).

The Categorical Imperative, in Kant’s view, is an objective, unconditional and necessary principle of reason that applies to all rational agents in all circumstances. Although Kant gives several examples in the Groundwork that illustrate this principle, he goes on to describe in later writings, especially in The Metaphysics of Morals , a complicated normative ethical theory for interpreting and applying the CI to human persons in the natural world. His framework includes various levels, distinctions and application procedures. Kant, in particular, describes two subsidiary principles that are supposed to capture different aspects of the CI. The Universal Principle of Right, which governs issues about justice, rights and external acts that can be coercively enforced, holds that “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law” (MM 6:230). The Supreme Principle of the Doctrine of Virtue, which governs questions about moral ends, attitudes, and virtue, requires us to “act in accordance with a maxim of ends that it can be a universal law for everyone to have” (MM 6:395). These principles, in turn, justify more specific duties of right and of ethics and virtue.

In Kant’s framework, duties of right are narrow and perfect because they require or forbid particular acts, while duties of ethics and virtue are wide and imperfect because they allow significant latitude in how we may decide to fulfill them. For example, Kant claims that the duty not to steal the property of another person is narrow and perfect because it precisely defines a kind of act that is forbidden. The duty of beneficence, on the other hand, is characterized as wide and imperfect because it does not specify exactly how much assistance we must provide to others.

Even with a system of moral duties in place, Kant admits that judgment is often required to determine how these duties apply to particular circumstances. Moral laws, Kant says, “must be meticulously observed” but “they cannot, after all, have regard to every little circumstance, and the latter may yield exceptions, which do not always find their exact resolution in the laws” (V 27:574; see also CPR A133/B172; MM 6:411).

The received view is that Kant’s moral philosophy is a deontological normative theory at least to this extent: it denies that right and wrong are in some way or other functions of goodness or badness. It denies, in other words, the central claim of teleological moral views. For instance, act consequentialism is one sort of teleological theory. It asserts that the right action is that action of all the alternatives available to the agent that has the best overall outcome. Here, the goodness of the outcome determines the rightness of an action. Another sort of teleological theory might focus instead on character traits. “Virtue ethics” asserts that a right action in any given circumstance is that action a virtuous person does or would perform in those circumstances. In this case, it is the goodness of the character of the person who does or would perform it that determines the rightness of an action. In both cases, as it were, the source or ground of rightness is goodness. And Kant’s own views have typically been classified as deontological precisely because they have seemed to reverse this priority and deny just what such theories assert. Rightness, on the standard reading of Kant, is not grounded in the value of outcomes or character.

There are several reasons why readers have thought that Kant denies the teleological thesis. First, he makes a plethora of statements about outcomes and character traits that appear to imply an outright rejection of both forms of teleology. For instance, in Groundwork I, he says that he takes himself to have argued that “the objectives we may have in acting, and also our actions’ effects considered as ends and what motivates our volition, can give to actions no unconditional or moral worth…[this] can be found nowhere but in the principle of the will, irrespective of the ends that can be brought about by such action” (G 4: 400). This appears to say that moral rightness is not a function of the value of intended or actual outcomes. Kant subsequently says that a categorical imperative “declares an action to be objectively necessary of itself without reference to any purpose—that is, even without any further end” (G 4:415). A categorical imperative “commands a certain line of conduct directly, without assuming or being conditional on any further goal to be reached by that conduct” (G 4:416). These certainly appear to be the words of someone who rejects the idea that what makes actions right is primarily their relationship to what good may come of those actions, someone who rejects outright the act consequentialist form of teleology. Moreover, Kant begins the Groundwork by noting that character traits such as the traditional virtues of courage, resolution, moderation, self-control, or a sympathetic cast of mind possess no unconditional moral worth, (G 4:393–94, 398–99). If the moral rightness of an action is grounded in the value of the character traits of the person who performs or would perform it then it seems Kant thinks that it would be grounded in something of only conditional value. This certainly would not comport well with the virtue ethics form of teleology.

Second, there are deeper theoretical claims and arguments of Kant’s in both the Groundwork and in the second Critique that appear to be incompatible with any sort of teleological form of ethics. These claims and arguments all stem from Kant’s insistence that morality is grounded in the autonomy of a rational will. For instance, Kant states that “if the will seeks the law that is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims for its own giving of universal law…heteronomy always results” (G 4:441). If the law determining right and wrong is grounded in either the value of outcomes or the value of the character of the agent, it seems it will not be found in the fitness of the action’s maxim to be a universal law laid down by the agent’s own rational will. And Kant’s most complete treatment of value, the second Critique’s “On the Concept of an Object of Pure Practical Reason”, appears to be a relentless attack on any sort of teleological moral theory. “The concept of good and evil” he states, “must not be determined before the moral law (for which, as it would seem, this concept would have to be made the basis) but only (as was done here) after it and by means of it” (CPrR 5:63).

A number of Kant’s readers have come to question this received view, however. Perhaps the first philosopher to suggest a teleological reading of Kant was John Stuart Mill. In the first chapter of his Utilitarianism , Mill implies that the Universal Law formulation of the Categorical Imperative could only sensibly be interpreted as a test of the consequences of universal adoption of a maxim. Several 20th century theorists have followed Mill’s suggestion, most notably, R. M. Hare. Hare argued that moral judgments such as “Stealing is wrong” are in fact universal prescriptions (“No stealing anywhere by anyone!”). And because they are universal, Hare argued, they forbid making exceptions. That in turn requires moral judgments to give each person’s wellbeing, including our own, equal weight. And when we give each person’s wellbeing equal weight, we are acting to produce the best overall outcome. Thus, in his view, the CI is “simply utilitarianism put into other words” (1993, p. 103). More recently, David Cummiskey (1996) has argued that Kant’s view that moral principles are justified because they are universalizable is compatible with those principles themselves being consequentialist. Indeed, Cummiskey argues that they must be: Respect for the value of humanity entails treating the interests of each as counting for one and one only, and hence for always acting to produce the best overall outcome.

There are also teleological readings of Kant’s ethics that are non-consequentialist. Barbara Herman (1993) has urged philosophers to “leave deontology behind” as an understanding of Kant’s moral theory on the grounds that the conception of practical reason grounding the Categorical Imperative is itself a conception of value. Herman’s idea is that Kant never meant to say that no value grounds moral principles. That, she argues, would imply that there would be no reason to conform to them. Instead, Kant thought the principles of rationality taken together constitute rational agency, and rational agency so constituted itself functions as a value that justifies moral action (1993, 231). Herman’s proposal thus has Kant’s view grounding the rightness of actions in rational agency, and then in turn offering rational agency itself up as a value. Both Paul Guyer and Allen Wood have offered proposals that differ from Herman’s in content, but agree on the general form of teleology that she defends as a reading of Kant. Guyer argues that autonomy itself is the value grounding moral requirements. Moral thinking consists in recognizing the priceless value of a rational agent’s autonomous will, something in light of whose value it is necessary for any rational agent to modify his behavior (1998, 22–35). And Wood argues that humanity itself is the grounding value for Kant. While the second Critique claims that good things owe their value to being the objects of the choices of rational agents, they could not, in his view, acquire any value at all if the source of that value, rational agency, itself had no value (1999, 130; see also 157–8). Finally, Rae Langton has argued that if Kant’s theory is to be thought of as an objectivistic view, we must suppose that the value of humanity and the good will are independent of simply being the objects of our rational choices. If their value thereby becomes the source of the rightness of our actions — say, our actions are right if and because they treat that self-standing value in various ways — then her reading too is teleological.

It is of considerable interest to those who follow Kant to determine which reading — teleological or deontological — was actually Kant’s, as well as which view ought to have been his. A powerful argument for the teleological reading is the motivation for Herman’s proposal: What rationale can we provide for doing our duty at all if we don’t appeal to it’s being good to do it? But a powerful argument for the deontological reading is Kant’s own apparent insistence that the authority of moral demands must come simply from their being the demands of a rational will, quite apart from the value that will may have (see Schneewind 1996; Johnson 2007, 2008; and Reath 1994). On the latter view, moral demands gain their authority simply because a rational will, insofar as you are rational, must will them. Proponents of this reading are left with the burden of answering Herman’s challenge to provide a rationale for having willed such demands, although one response may be that the very question Herman raises does not make sense because it asks, in effect, why it is rational to be rational. On the former view, by contrast, a rationale is at hand: because your will is, insofar as it is rational, good. Proponents of this former reading are, however, then left with the burden of explaining how it could be the autonomy of the will alone that explains the authority of morality.

It has seemed to a number of Kant’s interpreters that it is important to determine whether Kant’s moral philosophy was realist, anti-realist or something else (e.g. a constructivist). The issue is tricky because terms such as “realism,” “anti-realism” and “constructivism” are terms of art, so it is all too easy for interlocutors to talk past one another.

One relevant issue is whether Kant’s views commit him to the thesis that moral judgments are beliefs, and so apt to be evaluated for their truth or falsity (or are “truth apt”).

One might have thought that this question is quite easy to settle. At the basis of morality, Kant argued, is the Categorical Imperative, and imperatives are not truth apt. It makes little sense to ask whether “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” is true. But, in fact, the question is not at all easy. For one thing, moral judgments such as “Lying is wrong” might well be best analyzed according to Kant’s views as “The Categorical Imperative commands us not to lie”, and this judgment is not an imperative, but a report about what an imperative commands. Thus while at the foundation of morality there would be an imperative which is not truth apt, particular moral judgments themselves would describe what that imperative rules out and so would themselves be truth apt.

Philosophers such as R.M. Hare, however, have taken Kant’s view to be that moral judgments are not truth apt. Although on the surface moral judgments can look as if they describe a moral world, they are, as Hare reads Kant, “prescriptions”, not “descriptions”. This is not, in his view, to say that Kant’s ethics portrays moral judgments as lacking objectivity. Objectivity, according to Hare, is to be understood as universality, and the Categorical Imperative prescribes universally.

A second issue that has received considerable attention is whether Kant is a metaethical constructivist or realist.

Constructivism in metaethics is the view that moral truths are, or are determined by, the outcomes of actual or hypothetical procedures of deliberation or choice. Many who interpret Kant as a constructivist claim that his analysis of “duty” and “good will” reveals that if there are moral requirements then the agents who are bound to them have autonomy of the will (Rawls 1980; Korsgaard 1996; O’Neil 1989; Reath 2006; Hill 1989a, 1989b, 2001; Cureton 2013, 2014; Engstrom 2009). Autonomy, in this sense, means that such agents are both authors and subjects of the moral law and, as such, are not bound by any external requirements that may exist outside of our wills. Instead, we are only subject to moral requirements that we impose on ourselves through the operation of our own reason independently of our natural desires and inclinations. The common error of previous ethical theories, including sentimentalism, egoism and rationalism, is that they failed to recognize that morality presupposes that we have autonomy of the will. These theories mistakenly held that our only reasons to be moral derive from hypothetical imperatives about how to achieve given moral ends that exist independently of the activity of reason itself (for a discussion of Kant’s more specific objections to previous ethical theories, see Schneewind 2009). On these interpretations, Kant is a skeptic about arbitrary authorities, such as God, natural feelings, intrinsic values or primitive reasons that exist independently of us. Only reason itself has genuine authority over us, so we must exercise our shared powers of reasoned deliberation, thought and judgment, guided by the Categorical Imperative as the most basic internal norm of reason, to construct more specific moral requirements. Kantians in this camp, however, disagree about how this rational procedure should be characterized.

Other commentators interpret Kant as a robust moral realist (Ameriks 2003; Wood 1999; Langton 2007; Kain 2004). According to these philosophers, Kant’s theory, properly presented, begins with the claim that rational nature is an objective, agent-neutral and intrinsic value. The moral law then specifies how we should regard and treat agents who have this special status. Autonomy of the will, on this view, is a way of considering moral principles that are grounded in the objective value of rational nature and whose authority is thus independent of the exercise of our wills or rational capacities.

Some interpreters of Kant, most notably Korsgaard (1996), seem to affirm a kind of quietism about metaethics by rejecting many of the assumptions that contemporary metaethical debates rest on. For example, some of these philosophers seem not to want to assert that moral facts and properties just are the outcomes of deliberative procedures. Rather, they seem more eager to reject talk of facts and properties as unnecessary, once a wholly acceptable and defensible procedure is in place for deliberation. That is, the whole framework of facts and properties suggests that there is something we need to moor our moral conceptions to “out there” in reality, when in fact what we only need a route to a decision. Once we are more sensitive to the ethical concerns that really matter to us as rational agents, we will find that many of the questions that animate metaethicists turn out to be non-questions or of only minor importance. Others have raised doubts, however, about whether Kantians can so easily avoid engaging in metaethical debates (Hussain & Shaw 2013).

Primary Sources

Kant’s original German and Latin writings can be found in Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), 1900–, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter. Most translations include volume and page numbers to this standard Academy edition. Citations in this article do so as well. There are many English translations of Kant’s primary ethical writings. The recent Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant provides critical translations of Kant’s published works as well as selections from his correspondence and lectures. The following volumes of that series are especially relevant to his moral theory:

• Practical Philosophy , translated by Mary Gregor, 1996. Includes: “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , Critique of Practical Reason , and The Metaphysics of Morals .
• Religion and Rational Theology , translated by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, 1996. Includes: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
• Anthropology, History, and Education , translated by Robert Louden and Guenther Zoeller, 2008. Includes: “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim,” Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View , and “Lectures on Pedagogy”
• Lectures on Ethics , translated by Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind, 2001.
• Critique of Pure Reason , translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, 1998.

Recent Commentaries on Kant’s Ethical Writings

There have been several comprehensive commentaries on the Groundwork that have been published recently, some of which also include new English translations.

• Allison, Henry, 2011, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Denis, Lara, 2005, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals , Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
• Guyer, Paul, 2007, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s Guide , New York: Continuum.
• Hill, Thomas & Zweig, Arnulf, 2003, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Höffe, Otfried (ed. ), 1989, “ Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten”: Ein Kooperativer Kommentar , Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann.
• Schönecker, Dieter, 2015, Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Timmermann, Jens, 2007, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1973, The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals , New York: Harper & Row.

There are also recent commentaries on the The Metaphysics of Morals :

• Andreas Trampota, Andreas, Sensen, Oliver & Timmermann, Jens (eds.), 2011, Kant’s “Tugendlehre”: A Commentary , Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 343–364.
• Byrd, Sharon & Hruschka, Joachim, 2010 Kant’s Doctrine of Right: A Commentary , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gregor, Mary, 1963, The Laws of Freedom , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

The classic commentary on the Critique of Practical Reason is:

• Beck, Lewis White, 1960, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Other Secondary Sources

• Allison, Henry, 1990, Kant’s Theory of Freedom , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Ameriks, Karl, 2003, “On Two Non-Realist Interpretations of Kant’s Ethics,” in his Interpreting Kant’s Critiques , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 263–282.
• Aune, Bruce, 1979, Kant’s Theory of Morals , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Baron, Marcia, 2003, “Acting from Duty,” in Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals , Allen Wood (trans. ), New Haven: Yale University Press, 98–9.
• –––, 1995, Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology , Ithica: Cornell University Press.
• Barclay, Linda, 2020, Disability with Dignity , New York: Routledge.
• Baxley, Anne Margaret, 2010, Kant’s Theory of Virtue: The Value of Autocracy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Betzler, Monica, 2008, Kant’s Ethics of Virtue , New York: Walter de Gruyter.
• Carnois, Bernard, 1987, The Coherence of Kant’s Doctrine of Freedom , D. Booth (tr.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Cureton, Adam, 2013, “A Contractualist Reading of Kant’s Proof of the Formula of Humanity,” Kantian Review , 18(3): 363–86.
• –––, 2014, “Making Room for Rules,” Philosophical Studies , 172(3): 737–759.
• ––– 2014, “Kant on Cultivating a Good and Stable Will,” in Iskra Fileva (ed.), Perspectives on Character , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 63–77.
• –––, 2016, “Offensive Beneficence,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 2(1): 74–90.
• –––, and Thomas E. Hill, 2014, “Kant on Virtue and the Virtues,” in Nancy Snow (ed.), Cultivating Virtue , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87–110.
• –––, 2018, “Kant on Virtue: Seeking the Ideal in Human Conditions,” in Nancy Snow (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 263–280.
• –––, 2021, “Treating Disabled Adults as Children: An Application of Kant’s Conception of Respect,” in Respect: Philosophical Essays , Richard Dean and Oliver Sensen (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 270–288.
• Darwall, Stephen, 1985, “Kantian Practical Reason Defended,” Ethics , 96: 89–99.
• –––, 1977, “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics , 88: 36–49.
• Denis, Lara, 2006, “Kant’s Conception of Virtue,” in Paul Guyer (ed. ), Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 505–537.
• Engstrom, Stephen, 1992, “The Concept of the Highest Good in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 51(4): 747–80.
• –––, 2009, The Form of Practical Knowledge , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2002, “The Inner Freedom of Virtue,” in Mark Timmons (ed.), Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 289–315.
• Feldman, Fred, 1978, “Kantian Ethics,” in his Introductory Ethics , New York: Prentice-Hall, 97–117.
• Foot, Philippa, 1972, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” The Philosophical Review , 81(3): 305–316.
• Guyer, Paul, 1987, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2000, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2005, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2009, “Problems with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and its Subsequent Emendations,” in Jens Timmermann (ed.) Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 176–202.
• Herman, Barbara, 1993, The Practice of Moral Judgment , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1996, “Making Room for Character,” in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics: Rethinking Happiness and Duty , in S. Engstrom and J. Whiting (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 36–60.
• Hill, Thomas E., 2001, “Hypothetical Consent in Kantian Constructivism,” Social Philosophy and Policy , 18 (2): 300–329. Reprinted in his 2002 Human Welfare and Moral Worth , New York: Cambridge University Press, 61–96
• –––, 1989a, “Kantian Constructivism in Ethics,” Ethics , 99: 752–70. Reprinted in his 1992 Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 226–250.
• –––, 1971, “Kant on Imperfect Duty and Supererogation,” Kant Studien , 62: 55–76. Reprinted in his 1992 Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 147–175.
• –––, 2008, “Kantian Virtue and ’Virtue Ethics’”, in Monika Betzler (ed.), Kant’s Ethics of Virtues , Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 29–60. Reprinted in his 2012 Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 129–59.
• –––, 1973, “The Hypothetical Imperative,” The Philosophical Review , 82: 429–50. Reprinted in his 1992 Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 17–37.
• –––, 1989b, “The Kantian Conception of Autonomy,” in The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy , John Christman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in his 1992 Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 76–96.
• –––, 1972, “The Kingdom of Ends,” Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress: Held at the University of Rochester, March 30–April 4, 1970 , Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 307–15. Reprinted in his 1992 Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant’s Moral Theory , Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 58–66.
• –––, 2020, “Ideals of Appreciation and Expressions of Respect,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability , Adam Cureton and David Wasserman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 363–379.
• Hogan, Desmond, 2009, “Noumenal Affection,” The Philosophical Review , 118(4): 501–32.
• Holtman, Sarah, 2018, “Beneficence and Disability,” in Disability in Practice: Attitudes, Policies, and Relationships , Adam Cureton and Thomas E. Hill, Jr. (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 33–49.
• Hudson, Hud, 1994, Kant’s Compatibilism , Ithica: Cornell University Press.
• Hussain, Nadeem & Shaw, Nishi, 2013, “Meta–ethics and its Discontents: A Case–study of Korsgaard,” in C. Bagnoli (ed.), Constructivism in Ethics , New York: Cambridge University Press, 82–107.
• Johnson, Robert N., 1996, “Kant’s Conception of Merit,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly , 77: 313–37
• –––, 2007, “Value and Autonomy in Kantian Ethics,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics , Vol. 2, R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 133–48.
• –––, 2008, “Was Kant a Virtue Ethicist?,” in Kant’s Ethics of Virtue, M. Betzler (ed.), Berlin: DeGruyter, 61–76.
• –––, 2011, Self-Improvement: An Essay in Kantian Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kain, Patrick, 2004, “Self-Legislation in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 86(3): 257–306.
• –––, 2009, “Kant’s Defense of Human Moral Status,” Journal of the History of Philosophy , 47(1): 59–101.
• Kittay, Eva, 2005, “At the Margins of Moral Personhood,” Ethics , 116(1): 100–131.
• Kohl, Markus, 2016, “Kant on Idealism, Freedom, and Standpoints,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie , 98(1): 21–54.
• Korsgaard, Christine, 1996, Creating the Kingdom of ends , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1996, The Sources of Normativity , O. O’Neill (ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2008, The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2020, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Langton, Rae, 2007, “Objective and Unconditioned Value,” The Philosophical Review , 116(2): 157–185.
• Louden, Robert, 2000, Kant’s Impure Ethics , New York: Oxford University Press.
• O’Neill, Onora, 1975, Acting on Principle , New York: Columbia University Press.
• –––, 1989, Constructions of Reason , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1996, Towards Justice and Virtue , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Paton, H. J. , 1947, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy , London: Hutchinson’s University Library.
• Rawls, John, 1971, A Theory of Justice , Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1980, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy , 77: 515–72. Reprinted in Rawls, John, 1999, Collected Papers , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 303–358.
• –––, 1989, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions , E. Förster (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 81–113.
• –––, 2000, Lectures in the History of Moral Philosophy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Reath, Andrews, 2006, Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2015, “Did Kant Hold that Rational Volition is Sub Ratione Boni?,” in Mark Timmons & Robert Johnson (eds.), Reason, Value, and Respect: Kantian Themes from the Philosophy of Thomas E Hill, Jr. , New York: Oxford University Press, 232–55.
• –––, 1994, “Legislating the Moral Law,” Nôus , 28(4): 435–464.
• Rippon, Simon, 2014, “Were Kant’s Hypothetical Imperatives Wide-Scope Oughts?,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 92(4): 783–788.
• Ross, W. D., 1954, Kant’s Ethical Theory , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Schapiro, Tamar, 1999, “What Is a Child?” Ethics , 109(4): 715–738.
• Schmucker, Josef, 1961, Die Ursprünge der Ethik Kants , Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain.
• Schneewind, J. B. , 2009, “Kant Against the ‘spurious principles of morality’,” in J. Timmermann (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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• Schroeder, Mark, 2005, “The Hypothetical Imperative?,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 83(3): 357–372.
• Sensen, Oliver, 2013, “Kant’s Constructivism” in C. Bagnoli (ed.), Constructivism in Ethics , New York: Cambridge University Press, 63–81.
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• –––, 2011, Kant on Human Dignity , Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.
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Essay on Morality

• How do you make moral decisions? What resources inform you, personal, professional, etc.?

Moral decision is a rational procedure of moral consciousness that makes the choice of action giving preferences to certain moral values. Main steps in making moral decisions are analysis of moral situation, definition of the problem, comparison of options, assessment of consequences, and making the decision.

Correctness of the decision depends on the individual’s knowledge of the issue, which, in turn, relies on personal moral experience and moral culture. Moral decision-making involves such mechanisms of ethical consciousness as sense, reason, and intuition. While sense successfully functions in solving relatively simple moral problems (with common, patterned acts), it gives way to reason that makes creative moral decisions. Thus, moral experience guides a person in situations where circumstances are beyond the stereotypical thinking. In a situation that does not provide sufficient information for decision-making and at the same time requires a quick choice of an option, moral intuition comes into action. Accumulating moral experience of a person, intuition in a way replaces the missing opportunity to assess all the pros and cons for each of the options for action (Holmes, 2007). All three mechanisms complement each other, and only the adequacy of one of them to a specific situation allows making a moral decision.

Dynamic pace of modern life along with scientific and technological revolution and its affect on society increase the individual’s responsibility for moral decisions. Therefore, there is a strong need to create a harmonic moral world of an individual, whose rational decisions should be done not at the expense of one’s emotional richness, and achieved in unity with the development of the culture of the feelings.

• Discuss the moral dilemma from the short film on food (Food, Inc). What solutions would you recommend?

The film in question is an unflattering overlook of the US food industry and corporations that control it. The author investigates the industrial production of meat, grains and vegetables, showing viewers how inhumane and environmentally unfriendly this process is now. The law allows corporations to deliver to consumer’s table cheap but dangerous food.

Any corporation, if it was a real person, would be unsociable, intractable, authoritarian, and not prone to long-term relationships. The courts and the government consider a corporation as a community of shareholders, as a business owner, but the corporation itself has no moral barriers and liabilities (Weber, 2009).

On the one hand, the demonstrated technology would be useful in the case of a cataclysm, when humanity would not be able to grow food in a natural way. But currently it is not the case and there is no justified need for such food! On the other hand, when corporations, whose aim is cheap production and maximal profits, take over the production of food, that is when these technologies come at hand. In the second half of the twentieth century, we discovered an amazing opportunity to produce cheap chemicals: fertilizers, chlorine, and pesticides to kill insects. It seemed that all of this would improve our lives. But what we see now? Cancer epidemic which we cannot stop (Weber, 2009).

The film presents a standard and one of the most important moral dilemmas of modern society – the choice between public good and private gain. Of course, one could say that there is an easy way out – to follow one’s moral principles and collectively decide to refuse from substance and technology dangerous for the environment and human. However, in such dense networks that depend on the decisions of many people, relying on the moral qualities of each of them is a utopia. Yet, one of the possible effective solutions could be tougher legislation in this area, and reduction of the influence of corporations on government.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — To Kill a Mockingbird — It’s A Sin To Kill A Mockingbird: Exploring the Moral Imperative in Harper Lee’s Novel

It's a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird: Exploring The Moral Imperative in Harper Lee's Novel

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Argument: Morality Is the Enemy of Peace

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Morality Is the Enemy of Peace

The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine can only end with deals that don’t satisfy anyone completely.

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• Stephen M. Walt

French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838) was an accomplished political survivor who managed to serve the French revolutionary government, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the postwar Bourbon restoration. He was a subtle and accomplished statesman, remembered today primarily for his sage advice to his fellow diplomats: “Above all, not too much zeal.” Wise words, indeed: Overzealousness, rigidity, and excessive moralizing are often obstacles to any effort to find effective solutions to difficult international issues.

Unfortunately, political leaders routinely frame disputes with other countries in highly moralistic terms, thereby turning tangible but limited conflicts of interest into broader disputes over first principles. As Anderson University’s Abigail S. Post argued in an important article in the journal International Security last year, leaders engaged in international disputes use moral language to rally support at home and abroad and to enhance their bargaining position vis-à-vis their adversaries. When they do, disagreements over potentially divisible issues (such as disputed territory) turn into zero-sum conflicts between competing moral claims. Unfortunately, moral principles are hard to abandon or relax without inviting accusations of hypocrisy and charges of betrayal. Once governments use moral arguments to justify their positions, cutting a deal becomes much harder, even when it would be in everyone’s interest.

Post’s article illustrated these dynamics with a revealing case study of the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas dispute between Argentina and Great Britain. To back its claim to the islands, each side invoked familiar moral norms. Argentina relied on the norm of territorial sovereignty, and its case was straightforward: Britain had illegally seized the islands in 1833 and therefore should give them back, full stop. The British responded by invoking a different moral principle: the norm of self-determination. In their view, it didn’t matter how Britain had gained control of the islands; as long as a majority of the residents wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom, their preferences should prevail.

Once these two positions were firmly established, compromise became nearly impossible. Despite the islands’ limited economic and strategic value, reestablishing control became a potent political issue in Argentina. But British governments could not cede them to Argentina without appearing to abandon a group of British citizens who wanted to remain under British rule. Given these entrenched positions, a military confrontation was probably inevitable.

In short: Moral claims transform divisible and potentially solvable disputes into indivisible and much less tractable conflicts. Among other things, this finding suggests an important revision to the so-called bargaining model of war. This framework views most conflicts as being over potentially divisible issues and argues that, rationally, states could reach mutually acceptable solutions if they had perfect information about each other’s capabilities and resolve and could overcome the “commitment problem” (i.e., the inability to assure others that a deal will be kept). Wars occur because the necessary information is typically lacking and states have incentives to misrepresent it, and fighting is the only way to determine who should get what share of the issue(s) in dispute. Scholars using this framework acknowledge that wars can also arise over indivisible issues where compromise is impossible, but such issues are presumed to be relatively rare. Post’s research suggests that framing disputes in highly moralistic terms transforms divisible issues into indivisible ones, making solutions harder to reach and war more likely.qq

Examples of this problem dominate today’s headlines. The present conflict over Taiwan resembles the dispute over the Falklands in certain respects: China claims Taiwan as its sovereign territory by historic right and insists that the past events that left it outside its control should now be reversed. From this perspective, anything short of Taiwan’s full reversion to Chinese sovereignty is unacceptable. By contrast, supporters of Taiwanese autonomy argue that the island’s 24 million inhabitants want to govern themselves and oppose being ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. In this view, restoring Taiwan to Chinese control would violate the political rights of the people who live there. Compromise is difficult because both moral claims have some validity, and anything that falls short of each side’s stated position will immediately be viewed as a betrayal of a fundamental political principle.

Now consider how the war in Ukraine is framed by each side. The war arose from a set of concrete and tangible disagreements that were potentially amenable to negotiation and compromise. These issues included Ukraine’s possible entry into NATO; its degree of economic, political, and security integration with Russia and the EU; the status of Russian-speaking minorities within Ukraine; basing rights for the Russian Black Sea Fleet; the supposed role of allegedly neo-Nazi groups within Ukraine; and several others. Difficult issues to be sure, but in theory any or all of them could have been resolved in ways that might have satisfied each side’s core interests and spared Ukraine and Russia a costly and brutal war.

Today, however, the conflict is widely framed by each side as a clash between competing moral principles. For Ukraine and the West, what is at stake is the post-World War II norm against conquest, the credibility of the “rules-based order,” and the desire to defend a struggling democracy facing a ruthless dictatorship. For Ukrainians, it is a war to defend the nation and its sacred territory; for some of Kyiv’s supporters in the West, helping it win is necessary to uphold the moral principles upon which the Western order supposedly rests.

Russia’s justification for the war increasingly rests on moral assertions of its own, such as the accusation that NATO reneged on an earlier pledge not to expand beyond Germany, the claim that there is a deep cultural unity between Russians and Ukrainians that must be preserved, or the insistence that preserving Russian culture requires defending the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine and ensuring the permanent “ de-Nazification ” of Ukraine. One need not accept any of these claims to recognize that they go beyond a mere assertion of narrow strategic interests: Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates now frame the conflict as essential to preserving Russian national identity (and national security) in the face of hostile foreign pressure. Rhetorically, at least, it is far more than just a quarrel over minority rights in the Donbas or even Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment.

Unfortunately, framing this conflict in moral terms makes it harder to reach a peace settlement, because anything short of total victory inevitably invites a powerful backlash from critics fearing that these critical values are being sacrificed. If the United States or NATO were to push Ukraine to cut a deal short of total victory, they would face a chorus of denunciations from those who believe that only a humiliating Russian defeat and Ukraine’s entry into NATO will satisfy the demands of justice. If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to negotiate a cease-fire today, he might well be ousted by hard-liners seeking to fight on. Putin faces fewer internal constraints, but even he might be leery of a compromise at odds with the moral claims he has used to justify the war and retain public support.

And then there’s Gaza, the latest unhappy episode in the long conflict between Jews and Arabs that began when Zionist settlers began arriving in Palestine in the late 19th century. As with Ukraine, there are numerous tangible issues involved in this dispute, and there have been repeated efforts (beginning well before Israel’s founding) to find some sort of solution. Unfortunately, the two sides’ positions ultimately rest on competing moral claims to the territory lying between the river and the sea, claims that combine one-sided historical narratives, religious beliefs, and firm conviction that the other side has committed numerous crimes in the past and continues to do so today. These competing moral claims inspire extreme responses by Hamas and by the Israelis, and they have made it far more difficult to devise a solution that would satisfy the legitimate national aspirations of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

Americans are as susceptible to this problem as anyone. Realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan lamented the tendency of American leaders to frame every rivalry in moral terms, which they correctly saw as a serious impediment to a more effective foreign policy. Moral language can be useful for rallying citizens and winning support, but it makes the United States look hypocritical whenever it acts otherwise, which turns out to be quite often. It also makes it harder for U.S. officials to bargain effectively with potential adversaries, either because we refuse to have diplomatic relations with them, or because even a mutually beneficial deal with a supposedly “evil” regime is seen as a cowardly failure to uphold key moral principles.

But let’s not kid ourselves: In the end, conflicts often conclude in messy and morally imperfect bargains. Even after one-sided victories, the winners often settle for somewhat less than their moral justifications would require. The United States demanded and got “ unconditional surrender ” in World War II, for example, only to tolerate (and in some cases, actively support ) the reentry of former Nazis into political life. It held war crimes trials in Japan and executed some former Japanese leaders but left Emperor Hirohito on his throne. U.S. leaders weren’t happy watching the Iron Curtain descend in Eastern Europe after the war, but they understood that accepting Soviet domination there was the price of postwar peace.

The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine will end with agreements that won’t satisfy anyone completely. None of the parties will get everything they want, and the strident moral declarations that leaders and pundits have issued while these wars were underway will ring hollow. The longer the participants cling to them, the harder it will be to bring the carnage to a close. If Talleyrand were alive today, I suspect he’d say, “I told you so.”

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter:  @stephenwalt

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The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017

Naomi ellemers.

1 Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Jojanneke van der Toorn

2 Leiden University, The Netherlands

Yavor Paunov

3 Mannheim University, Germany

Thed van Leeuwen

Associated data.

Supplemental material, APPENDIX_1._Exclusion_of_papers_in_review for The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017 by Naomi Ellemers, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov and Thed van Leeuwen in Personality and Social Psychology Review

Supplemental material, APPENDIX_2._Reference_list_of_all_studies_included_in_review_(1940-2017) for The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017 by Naomi Ellemers, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov and Thed van Leeuwen in Personality and Social Psychology Review

Supplemental material, APPENDIX_3._Bibliometric_indicators_used for The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017 by Naomi Ellemers, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov and Thed van Leeuwen in Personality and Social Psychology Review

Supplemental material, Supplementary_Figures for The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017 by Naomi Ellemers, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov and Thed van Leeuwen in Personality and Social Psychology Review

Supplemental material, Supplementary_Tables for The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017 by Naomi Ellemers, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov and Thed van Leeuwen in Personality and Social Psychology Review

We review empirical research on (social) psychology of morality to identify which issues and relations are well documented by existing data and which areas of inquiry are in need of further empirical evidence. An electronic literature search yielded a total of 1,278 relevant research articles published from 1940 through 2017. These were subjected to expert content analysis and standardized bibliometric analysis to classify research questions and relate these to (trends in) empirical approaches that characterize research on morality. We categorize the research questions addressed in this literature into five different themes and consider how empirical approaches within each of these themes have addressed psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior. We conclude that some key features of theoretical questions relating to human morality are not systematically captured in empirical research and are in need of further investigation.

This review aims to examine the “psychology of morality” by considering the research questions and empirical approaches of 1,278 empirical studies published from 1940 through 2017. We subjected these studies to expert content analysis and standardized bibliometric analysis to characterize relevant trends in this body of research. We first identify key features that characterize theoretical approaches to human morality, extract five distinct classes of research questions from the studies conducted, and visualize how these aim to address the psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior. We then compare this theoretical analysis with the empirical approaches and research paradigms that are typically used to address questions within each of these themes. We identify emerging trends and seminal publications, specify conclusions that can be drawn from studies conducted within each research theme, and outline areas in need of further investigation.

Morality indicates what is the “right” and “wrong” way to behave, for instance, that one should be fair and not unfair to others ( Haidt & Kesebir, 2010 ). This is considered of interest to explain the social behavior of individuals living together in groups ( Gert, 1988 ). Results from animal studies (e.g., de Waal, 1996 ) or insights into universal justice principles (e.g., Greenberg & Cropanzano, 2001 ) do not necessarily help us to address moral behavior in modern societies. This also requires the reconciliation of people who endorse different political orientations ( Haidt & Graham, 2007 ) or adhere to different religions ( Harvey & Callan, 2014 ). The observation that “good people can do bad things” further suggests that we should look beyond the causes of individual deviance or delinquency to understand moral behavior. In our analysis, we consider key explanatory principles emerging from prominent theoretical approaches to capture important features characterizing human morality ( Tomasello & Vaish, 2013 ). These relate to (a) the social anchoring of right and wrong, (b) conceptions of the moral self, and (c) the interplay between thoughts and experiences. We argue that these three key principles explain the interest of so many researchers in the topic of morality and examine whether and how these are addressed in empirical research available to date.

Through an electronic literature search (using Web of Science [WoS]) and manual selection of relevant entries, we collected empirical publications that contained an empirical measure and/or manipulation that was characterized by the authors as relevant to “morality.” With this procedure, we found 1,278 papers published from 1940 through 2017 that report research addressing morality. Notwithstanding the enormous research interest visible in empirical publications on morality, a comprehensive overview of this literature is lacking. In fact, the review paper on morality that was most frequently cited in our set was published more than 35 years ago ( Blasi, 1980 ). As it stands, separate strands of research seem to be driven by different questions and empirical approaches that do not connect to a common approach or research agenda. This makes it difficult to draw summary conclusions, to integrate different sets of findings, or to chart important avenues for future research.

To organize and understand how results from empirical studies relate to each other, we identify the relations that are implicitly seen to connect different research questions. The rationales provided to study specific issues commonly refer to the psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior and thus are seen to capture “the psychology of morality.” By content-analyzing the study reports provided, we classify the studies included in this review into five groups of thematic research questions and characterize the empirical approaches typically used in studies addressing each of these themes. With the help of bibliometric techniques, we then quantify emerging trends and consider how different clusters of study approaches relate to questions in each of the research themes examined. This allows us to clarify the theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from empirical work so far and to identify less examined issues in need of further study.

Morality and Social Order

Moral principles indicate what is a “good,” “virtuous,” “just,” “right,” or “ethical” way for humans to behave ( Haidt, 2012 ; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010 ; Turiel, 2006 ). Moral guidelines (“do no harm”) can induce individuals to display behavior that has no obvious instrumental use or no direct value for them, for instance, when they show empathy, fairness, or altruism toward others. Moral rules—and sanctions for those who transgress them—are used by individuals living together in social communities, for instance, to make them refrain from selfish behavior and to prevent them from lying, cheating, or stealing from others ( Ellemers, 2017 ; Ellemers & Van den Bos, 2012 ; Ellemers & Van der Toorn, 2015 ).

The role of morality in the maintenance of social order is recognized by scholars from different disciplines. Biologists and evolutionary scientists have documented examples of selfless and empathic behaviors observed in communities of animals living together, considering these as relevant origins of human morality (e.g., de Waal, 1996 ). The main focus of this work is on displays of fairness, empathy, or altruism in face-to-face groups, where individuals all know and depend on each other. In the analysis provided by Tomasello and Vaish (2013) , this would be considered the “first tier” of morality, where individuals can observe and reciprocate the treatment they receive from others to elicit and reward cooperative and empathic behaviors that help to protect individual and group survival.

Philosophers, legal scholars, and political scientists have addressed more abstract moral principles that can be used to regulate and govern the interactions of individuals in larger and more complex societies (e.g., Haidt, 2012 ; Mill 1861/1962 ). Here, the nature of cooperative or empathic behavior is much more symbolic as it depends less on direct exchanges between specific individuals, but taps into more abstract and ambiguous concepts such as “the greater good.” Scholarly efforts in this area have considered how specific behaviors might (not) be in line with different moral principles and which guidelines and procedures might institutionalize social order according to such principles (e.g., Churchland, 2011 ; Morris, 1997 ). These approaches tap into what Tomasello and Vaish (2013) consider the “second tier” of morality, which emphasizes the social signaling functions of moral behavior and distinguishes human from animal morality (see also Ellemers, 2018 ). At this level, behavioral guidelines that have lost their immediate survival value in modern societies (such as specific dress codes or dietary restrictions) may nevertheless come to be seen as prescribing essential behavior that is morally “right.” Specific behaviors can acquire this symbolic moral value to the extent that they define how individuals typically mark their religious identity, communicate respect for authority, or secure group belonging for those adhering to them ( Tomasello & Vaish, 2013 ). Moral judgments that function to maintain social order in this way rely on complex explanations and require verbal exchanges to communicate the moral overtones of behavioral guidelines. Language-driven interpretations and attributions are needed to capture symbolic meanings and inferred intentions that are not self-evident in behavioral displays or outwardly visible indicators of emotions ( Ellemers, 2018 ; Kagan, 2018 ).

The interest of psychologists in moral behavior as a factor in maintaining social order has long been driven by developmental questions (how do children acquire the ability to do this, for example, Kohlberg, 1969 ) and clinical implications (what are origins of social deviance and delinquency, for example, Rest, 1986 ). Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) publication, on the role of quick intuition versus deliberate reflection in distinguishing between right and wrong, marked a turning point in the interest of psychologists in these issues. The consideration of specific psychological mechanisms involved in moral reasoning prompted many psychological researchers to engage with this area of inquiry. This development also facilitated the connection of psychological theory to neurobiological mechanisms and inspired attempts to empirically examine underlying processes at this level—for instance, by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures to monitor the brain activity of individuals confronted with moral dilemmas ( Greene, 2013 ; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001 ).

Below, we will consider influential approaches that have advanced the understanding of human morality in social psychology, organizing them according to their main explanatory focus. These characterize the “second tier” ( Tomasello & Vaish, 2013 ) implications of morality that go beyond more basic displays of empathy and altruism observed in animal studies that form the root of biological and evolutionary explanations. From the theoretical perspectives currently available, we extract three key principles that capture the essence of human morality.

Social Anchoring of Right and Wrong

The first principle refers to the social implications of judgments about right and wrong. This has been emphasized as a defining characteristic of morality in different theoretical perspectives. For instance, Skitka (2010) and colleagues have convincingly argued that beliefs about what is morally right or wrong are unlike other attitudes or convictions ( Mullen & Skitka, 2006 ; Skitka, Bauman, & Sargis, 2005 ; Skitka & Mullen, 2002 ). Instead, moral convictions are seen as compelling mandates, indicating what everyone “ought” to or “should” do. This has important social implications, as people also expect others to follow these behavioral guidelines. They are emotionally affected and distressed when this turns out not to be the case, find it difficult to tolerate or resolve such differences, and may even resort to violence against those who challenge their views ( Skitka & Mullen, 2002 ).

This socially defined nature of moral guidelines is explicitly acknowledged in several theoretical perspectives on moral behavior. The Theory of Planned Behavior (e.g., Ajzen, 1991 ) offers a framework that clearly specifies how behavioral intentions are determined in an interplay of individual dispositions and social norms held by self-relevant others ( Ajzen & Fishbein, 1974 ; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974 ). For instance, research based on this perspective has been used to demonstrate that the adoption of moral behaviors, such as expressing care for the environment, can be enhanced when relevant others think this is important ( Kaiser & Scheuthle, 2003 ).

In a similar vein, Haidt (2001) argued that judgments of what are morally good versus bad behaviors or character traits are specified in relation to culturally defined virtues. This allows shared ideas about right and wrong to vary, depending on the cultural, religious, or political context in which this is defined ( Giner-Sorolla, 2012 ; Haidt & Graham, 2007 ; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010 ; Rai & Fiske, 2011 ). Haidt (2001) accordingly specifies that moral intuitions are developed through implicit learning of peer group norms and cultural socialization. This position is supported by empirical evidence showing how moral behavior plays out in groups ( Graham, 2013 ; Graham & Haidt, 2010 ; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013 ). This work documents the different principles that (groups of) people use in their moral reasoning ( Haidt, 2012 ). By connecting judgments about right and wrong to people’s group affiliations and social identities, this perspective clarifies why different religious, political, or social groups sometimes disagree on what is moral and find it difficult to understand the other position ( Greene, 2013 ; Haidt & Graham, 2007 ).

We argue that all these notions point to the socially defined and identity-affirming properties of moral guidelines and moral behaviors. Conceptions of right and wrong reflect the values that people share with important others and are anchored in the social groups to which they (hope to) belong ( Ellemers, 2017 ; Ellemers & Van den Bos, 2012 ; Ellemers & Van der Toorn, 2015 ; Leach, Bilali, & Pagliaro, 2015 ). This also implies that there is no inherent moral value in specific actions or overt displays, for instance, of empathy or helping. Instead, the same behaviors can acquire different moral meanings, depending on the social context in which they are displayed and the relations between actors and targets involved in this context ( Blasi, 1980 ; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012 ; Kagan, 2018 ; Reeder & Spores, 1983 ).

Thus, a first question to be answered when reviewing the empirical literature, therefore, is whether and how the socially shared and identity relevant nature of moral guidelines—central to key theoretical approaches—is adressed in the studies conducted to examine human morality.

Conceptions of the Moral Self

A second principle that is needed to understand human morality—and expands evolutionary and biological approaches—is rooted in the explicit self-awareness and autobiographical narratives that characterize human self-consciousness, and moral self-views in particular ( Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014 ).

Because of the far-reaching implications of moral failures, people are highly motivated to protect their self-views of being a moral person ( Pagliaro, Ellemers, Barreto, & Di Cesare, 2016 ; Van Nunspeet, Derks, Ellemers, & Nieuwenhuis, 2015 ). They try to escape self-condemnation, even when they fail to live up to their own moral standards. Different strategies have been identified that allow individuals to disengage their self-views from morally questionable actions ( Bandura, 1999 ; Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996 ; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008 ). The impact of moral lapses or moral transgressions on one’s self-image can be averted by redefining one’s behavior, averting responsibility for what happened, disregarding the impact on others, or excluding others from the right to moral treatment, to name just a few possibilities.

A key point to note here is that such attempts to protect moral self-views are not only driven by the external image people wish to portray toward others. Importantly, the conviction that one qualifies as a moral person also matters for internalized conceptions of the moral self ( Aquino & Reed, 2002 ; Reed & Aquino, 2003 ). This can prompt people, for instance, to forget moral rules they did not adhere to ( Shu & Gino, 2012 ), to fail to recall their moral transgressions ( Mulder & Aquino, 2013 ; Tenbrunsel, Diekmann, Wade-Benzoni, & Bazerman, 2010 ), or to disregard others whose behavior seems morally superior ( Jordan & Monin, 2008 ).

As a result, the strong desire to think of oneself as a moral person not only enhances people’s efforts to display moral behavior ( Ellemers, 2018 ; Van Nunspeet, Ellemers, & Derks, 2015 ). Instead, sadly, it can also prompt individuals to engage in symbolic acts to distance themselves from moral transgressions ( Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006 ) or even makes them relax their behavioral standards once they have demonstrated their moral intentions ( Monin & Miller, 2001 ). Thus, tendencies for self-reflection, self-consistency, and self-justification are both affected by and guide moral behavior, prompting people to adjust their moral reasoning as well as their judgments of others and to endorse moral arguments and explanations that help justify their own past behavior and affirm their worldviews ( Haidt, 2001 ).

A second important question to consider when reviewing the empirical literature on morality, thus, is whether and how studies take into account these self-reflective mechanisms in the development of people’s moral self-views. From a theoretical perspective, it is therefore relevant to examine antecedents and correlates of tendencies to engage in self-defensive and self-justifying responses. From an empirical perspective, it also implies that it is important to consider the possibility that people’s self-reported dispositions and stated intentions may not accurately indicate or predict the moral behavior they display.

The Interplay Between Thoughts and Experiences

A third principle that connects different theoretical perspectives on human morality is the realization that this involves deliberate thoughts and ideals about right and wrong, as well as behavioral realities and emotional experiences people have, for instance, when they consider that important moral guidelines are transgressed by themselves or by others. Traditionally, theoretical approaches in moral psychology were based on the philosophical reasoning that is also reflected in legal and political scholarship on morality. Here, the focus is on general moral principles, abstract ideals, and deliberate decisions that are derived from the consideration of formal rules and their implications ( Kohlberg, 1971 ; Turiel, 2006 ). Over the years, this perspective has begun to shift, starting with the observation made by Blasi (1980 , p. 1) that

Few would disagree that morality ultimately lies in action and that the study of moral development should use action as the final criterion. But also few would limit the moral phenomenon to objectively observable behavior. Moral action is seen, implicitly or explicitly, as complex, imbedded in a variety of feelings, questions, doubts, judgments, and decisions . . . . From this perspective, the study of the relations between moral cognition and moral action is of primary importance.

This perspective became more influential as a result of Haidt’s (2001) introduction of “moral intuition” as a relevant construct. Questions about what comes first, reasoning or intuition, have yielded evidence showing that both are possible (e.g., Feinberg, Willer, Antonenko, & John, 2012 ; Pizarro, Uhlmann, & Bloom, 2003 ; Saltzstein & Kasachkoff, 2004 ). That is, reasoning can inform and shape moral intuition (the classic philosophical notion), but intuitive behaviors can also be justified with post hoc reasoning (Haidt’s position). The important conclusion from this debate thus seems to be that it is the interplay between deliberate thinking and intuitive knowing that shapes moral guidelines ( Haidt, 2001 , 2003 , 2004 ). This points to the importance of behavioral realities and emotional experiences to understand how people reflect on general principles and moral ideals.

A first way in which this has been addressed resonates with the evolutionary survival value of moral guidelines to help avoid illness and contamination as sources of physical harm. In this context, it has been argued and shown that nonverbal displays of disgust and physical distancing can emerge as unthinking embodied experiences to morally aversive situations that may subsequently invite individuals to reason why similar situations should be avoided in the future ( Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008 ; Tapp & Occhipinti, 2016 ). The social origins of moral guidelines are acknowledged in approaches explaining the role of distress and empathy as implicit cues that can prompt individuals to decide which others are worthy of prosocial behavior ( Eisenberg, 2000 ). In a similar vein, the experience of moral anger and outrage at others who violate important guidelines is seen as indicating which guidelines are morally “sacred” ( Tetlock, 2003 ). Experiences of disgust, empathy, and outrage all indicate relatively basic affective states that are marked with nonverbal displays and have direct implications for subsequent actions ( Ekman, 1989 ; Ekman, 1992 ).

In addition, theoretical developments in moral psychology have identified the experience of guilt and shame as characteristic “moral” emotions. Compared with “primary” affective responses, these “secondary” emotions are used to indicate more complex, self-conscious states that are not immediately visible in nonverbal displays ( Tangney & Dearing, 2002 ; Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007 ). These moral emotions are seen to distinguish humans from most animals. Indeed, affording to others the perceived ability to experience such emotions communicates the degree to which we consider them to be human and worthy of moral treatment ( Haslam & Loughnan, 2014 ). The nature of guilt and shame as “self-condemning” moral emotions indicates their function to inform self-views and guide behavioral adaptations rather than communicating one’s state to others.

At the same time, it has been noted that feelings of guilt and shame can be so overwhelming that they raise self-defensive responses that stand in the way of behavioral improvement ( Giner-Sorolla, 2012 ). This can occur at the individual level as well as the group level, where the experience of “collective guilt” has been found to prevent intergroup reconciliation attempts ( Branscombe & Doosje, 2004 ). Accordingly, it has been noted that the relations between the experience of guilt and shame as moral emotions and their behavioral implications depend very much on further appraisals relating to the likelihood of social rejection and self-improvement that guide self-forgiveness ( Leach, 2017 ).

Regardless of which emotions they focus on, these theoretical perspectives all emphasize that moral concerns and moral decisions arise from situational realities, characterized by people’s experiences and the (moral) emotions these evoke. A third question emerging from theoretical accounts aiming to understand human morality, therefore, is whether and how the interplay between the thoughts people have about moral ideals (captured in principles, judgments, reasoning), on one hand, and the realities they experience (embodied behaviors, emotions), on the other, is explicitly addressed in empirical studies.

Empirical Approaches

Now that we have identified that socially shared, self-reflective, and experiential mechanisms represent three key principles that are seen as essential for the understanding of human morality in theory , it is possible to explore how these are reflected in the empirical work available. An initial answer to this question can be found by considering which types of research paradigms and classes of measures are frequently used in studies on morality. Do study designs typically take into account the way different social norms can shape individual moral behavior? Do instruments that are developed to assess people’s morality incorporate the notion that explicit self-reports do not necessarily capture their actual moral responses? And do responses that are assessed allow researchers to connect moral thoughts people have with their actual experiences?

We examined this by reviewing the empirical literature. Through an electronic literature search, we collected empirical studies reporting on manipulations and/or empirical measures that authors of these studies identified as being relevant to “morality.” In a first wave of data collection (see the “Method” section for further details), we extracted 419 empirical studies on morality that were published from 2000 through 2013. These were manually processed and content-coded to determine for each publication the research question that was asked, the research design that was employed to examine this, and the measures that were used (for details of how this was done, see Ellemers, Van der Toorn, & Paunov, 2017 ). We distinguished between correlational and experimental designs and assessed which manipulations were used to compare different responses (see Supplementary Table A ). We also listed and classified “named” scales and measures that were employed in these studies (see Table 1 ) and additionally indicated which types of responses were captured, in moral judgments provided, emotional and behavioral indicators, or with standardized scales (see Supplementary Table B ).

Four Types of Scales Used to Examine Morality in 91 Publications, With N Indicating the Number of Publications Using a Scale Type, Indicated in Order of Most Frequently Used (First Scale Mentioned) to Least Frequently Used (Last Scale Mentioned).

Note. A single publication can contain multiple scales.

Are Social Influences Taken Into Account?

An overview of the research designs that were coded in this way (see Supplementary Table A , final column) first reveals that a substantial proportion of these studies (185 of 419 studies examined; 44%) used correlational designs to examine, for instance, which traits people associate with particular targets or how self-reported beliefs, convictions, principles, or norms relate to self-stated intentions. Of the studies using an experimental design, a substantial number (91 studies; about 22%) examined the impact of some situational prime intended to activate specific goals, rules, or experiences. Furthermore, a substantial number of studies examined the impact of manipulating specific target characteristics (51 studies; 12%) or moral concerns (51 studies; 12%). However, experimental studies examining the impact of specific social norms (31 studies; 7%) or a group-based participant identity were relatively rare (four studies; less than 1%). This suggests that the socially shared nature of moral guidelines is not systematically addressed in this body of research.

Do Standard Instruments Rely on Self-Reports?

The types of responses typically examined in these studies can be captured by looking in more detail at the nature of the scales, tests, tasks, and questionnaires that were used. Our manual content analysis yielded 38 different scales, tests, tasks, and questionnaires that were used in 91 of the 419 studies examined (see Table 1 ). We clustered these according to their nature and intent, which yielded four distinct categories. We found seven different measures (used in 27 studies; 30%) that rely on hypothetical moral dilemmas , where people have to weigh different moral principles against each other (e.g., stealing from one person to help another person), and indicate what should be done in these situations. We found 11 additional measures (used in 12 studies; 13%) consisting of lists of traits or behaviors (e.g., honesty, helpfulness) that can be used to indicate the general character/personality type of the self or a known other (friend, family member). Here, we included measures such as the HEXACO Personality Inventory (HEXACO-PI; Lee & Ashton, 2004 ) and the moral identity scale ( Aquino & Reed, 2002 ). Third, we found 11 different measures (used in 31 studies; 34%) that assess the endorsement of abstract moral rules (e.g., “do no harm”). A representative example is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire ( Graham et al., 2011 ), which distinguishes between statements indicating concern for “individualizing” principles (harm/care, fairness) and “binding” principles (loyalty, authority, purity). Fourth, we found nine different measures (used in 20 studies; 22%) aiming to capture people’s position on specific moral issues (e.g., “it is important to tell the truth”; “it is ok for employees to take home a few office supplies”). We also included in this category different lists of behaviors (for instance, the Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale [MDBS]; Katz, Santman, & Lonero, 1994 ) that focus on the endorsement of behaviors considered relevant to morality (e.g., corruption, violence, discrimination, or misrepresentation).

Importantly, all four clusters of measures we found to rely on self-reported preferences and stated character traits or intentions, describing overall tendencies and general behavioral guidelines. However, it is less evident that such measures can be used to understand how people will actually behave in real-life situations, where they may have to choose which of different competing guidelines to apply or where it is unclear how the general principles they endorse translate to a specific act or decision in that context.

Are “Thoughts” Connected to “Experiences?”

Our manual coding of the different dependent measures that were used (see Supplementary Table B , final column) reveals that the majority of measures aimed to capture either general moral principles that people endorse (72 of 445 measures coded; 16%) or their moral evaluations of specific individuals, groups, or companies (72 measures; 16%). In addition, a substantial proportion of studies examined people’s positions on specific issues, such as abortion, gossiping, or specific political convictions (61 measures; 14%). Substantial numbers of measures assessed the perceived implications of one’s moral principles (48 measures; 11%) or the willingness to be cooperative or truthful in hypothetical situations (44 measures; 10%). Notably, a relatively small proportion of measures actually tried to capture cooperative or cheating behavior in experimental or real-life situations (51 measures; 12%). Similarly, empathy with others and moral emotions such as guilt, shame, and disgust were assessed in 15% (67) of the measures that were coded. Thus, the majority of measures used focuses on “thoughts” relating to morality, as these capture abstract principles, overall judgments, or hypothetical intentions, while much less attention has been devoted to examining behavioral displays or emotions characterizing the actual “experiences” people have in relation to these “thoughts.”

Thus, this initial examination of empirical evidence available in studies on morality published from 2000 through 2013 suggests that the three key theoretical principles we have extracted from relevant theoretical perspectives on morality are not systematically reflected in the research that has been carried out. Instead, it seems that “moral tendencies” are typically defined independently of the social context, specific norms, or the identity of others who may be affected by the (im)moral behavior. Furthermore, general and self-reported tendencies or preferences are often taken at face value without testing them against actual behavioral displays or emotional experiences. Finally, empirical studies have prioritized the examination of all kinds of “thoughts” relating to morality over attempts to connect these to actual moral “experiences.” Thus, this initial examination of the literature seems to reveal a mismatch between the empirical approach that is typically taken and leading theoretical perspectives—that emphasize the socially shared nature of moral guidelines, the self-justifying nature of moral reasoning, and the importance of emotional experiences.

As others have noted before us (e.g., Abend, 2013 ), this initial assessment of studies carried out suggests that the empirical breadth of past morality research is constrained in that some approaches appear to be favored at the expense of others. Studies often rely on highly artificial paradigms or scenarios ( Chadwick, Bromgard, Bromgard, & Trafimow, 2006 ; Eriksson, Strimling, Andersson, & Lindholm, 2017 ). They examine hypothetical reasoning or focus on a few specific decisions or actions that may rarely present themselves in everyday life, such as deciding about the course of a runaway train ( Bauman, McGraw, Bartels, & Warren, 2014 ; Graham, 2014 ) or eating one’s dog ( Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993 ; Mooijman & Van Dijk, 2015 ). This does not capture the wide variety of contexts in which moral choices have to be made (for instance, whether or not to sell a subprime mortgage to achieve individual performance targets), and it is not evident whether and how this limits the conclusions that can be drawn from such work (for similar critiques, see Crone & Laham, 2017 ; Graham, 2014 ; Hofmann et al., 2014 ; Lovett, Jordan, & Wiltermuth, 2015 ).

Understanding Moral Behavior

Our conclusion so far is that researchers in social psychology have displayed a considerable interest in examining topics relating to morality. However, it is not self-evident how the multitude of research topics and issues that are addressed in this literature can be organized. This is why we set out to organize the available research in this area into a limited set of meaningful categories by content-analyzing the publications we found to identify studies examining similar research questions. In the “Method” section, we provide a detailed explanation of the procedure and criteria we used to develop our coding scheme and to classify studies as relating to one of five research themes we extracted in this way. We now consider the nature of the research questions addressed within each of these themes and the rationales typically provided to study them, to specify how different research questions that are examined are seen to relate to each other. We visualize these hypothesized relations in Figure 1 .

The psychology of morality: connections between five research themes.

Researchers in this literature commonly cite the ambition to predict, explain, and influence Moral Behavior as their focal guideline for having an interest in examining some aspect of morality (see also Ellemers, 2017 ). We therefore place research questions relating to this theme at the center of Figure 1 . Questions about behavioral displays that convey the moral tendencies of individuals or groups fall under this research theme. These include research questions that address implicit indicators of moral preferences or cooperative choices, as well as more deliberate displays of helping, cheating, or standing up for one’s principles.

Many researchers claim to address the likely antecedents of such moral behaviors that are located in the individual as well as in the (social) environment. Here, we include research questions relating to Moral Reasoning , which can reflect the application of abstract moral principles as well as specific life experiences or religious and political identities that people use to locate themselves in the world (e.g., Cushman, 2013 ). This work addresses moral standards people can adhere to, for instance, in the decision guidelines they adopt or in the way they respond to moral dilemmas or evaluate specific scenarios.

We classify research questions as referring to Moral Judgments when these address the dispositions and behaviors of other individuals, groups, or companies in terms of their morality. These are considered as relevant indicators of the reasons why and conditions under which people are likely to display moral behavior. Research questions addressed under this theme consider the characteristics and actions of other individuals and groups as examples of behavior to be followed or avoided or as a source of information to extract social norms and guidelines for one’s own behavior (e.g., Weiner, Osborne, & Rudolph, 2011 ).

We distinguish between these two clusters to be able to separate questions addressing the process of moral reasoning (to infer relevant decision rules) from questions relating to the outcome in the form of moral judgments (of the actions and character of others). However, the connecting arrow in Figure 1 indicates that these two types of research questions are often discussed in relation to each other, in line with Haidt’s (2001) reasoning that these are interrelated mechanisms and that moral decision rules can prescribe how certain individuals should be judged, just as person judgments can determine which decision rules are relevant in interacting with them.

We proceed by considering research questions that relate to the psychological implications of moral behavior. The immediate affective implications of one’s behavior, and how this reveals one’s moral reasoning as well as one’s judgments of others, are addressed in questions relating to Moral Emotions ( Sheikh, 2014 ). These are the emotional responses that are seen to characterize moral situations and are commonly used to diagnose the moral implications of different events. Questions we classified under this research theme typically address feelings of guilt and shame that people experience with regard to their own behavior, or outrage and disgust in response to the moral transgressions of others.

Finally, we consider research questions addressing self-reflective and self-justifying tendencies associated with moral behavior. Studies aiming to investigate the moral virtue people afford to themselves and the groups they belong to, and the mechanisms they use for moral self-protection, are relevant for Moral Self-Views . Under this research theme, we subsume research questions that address the mechanisms people use to maintain self-consistency and think of themselves as moral persons, even when they realize that their behavior is not in line with their moral principles (see also Bandura, 1999 ).

Even though research questions often consider moral emotions and moral self-views as outcomes of moral behaviors and theorize about the factors preceding these behaviors, this does not imply that emotions and self-views are seen as the final end-states in this process. Instead, many publications refer to these mechanisms of interest as being iterative and assume that prior behaviors, emotions, and self-views also define the feedback cycles that help shape and develop subsequent reasoning and judgments of (self-relevant) others, which are important for future behavior. The feedback arrows in Figure 1 indicate this.

Our main goal in specifying how different types of research questions can be organized according to their thematic focus in this way is to offer a structure that can help monitor and compare the empirical approaches that are typically used to advance existing insights into different areas of interest. The relations depicted in Figure 1 represent the reasoning commonly provided to motivate the interest in different types of research questions. The location of the different themes in this figure clarifies how these are commonly seen to connect to each other and visualizes the (sometimes implicit) assumptions made about the way findings from different studies might be combined and should lead to cumulative insights. In the sections that follow, we will examine the empirical approaches used to address each of these clusters of research questions to specify the ways in which results from different types of studies actually complement each other and to identify remaining gaps in the empirical literature.

A Functionalist Perspective

An important feature of our approach is that we do not delineate research questions in terms of the specific moral concerns, guidelines, principles, or behaviors they address. Instead, we take a functionalist perspective in considering which mechanisms relevant to people’s thoughts and experiences relating to morality are examined to draw together the empirical evidence that is available. For each of the research themes described above, we therefore consider the empirical approaches that have been taken by identifying the nature of relevant functions or mechanisms that have been examined. This will help document the evidence that is available to support the notion that morality matters for the way people think about themselves, interact with others, live and work together in groups, and relate to other groups in society. In considering the different functions morality may have, we distinguish between four levels at which mechanisms in social psychology are generally studied (see also Ellemers, 2017 ; Ellemers & Van den Bos, 2012 ).

Intrapersonal Mechanisms

All the ways in which people consider, think, and reason by themselves to determine what is morally right refer to intrapersonal mechanisms. Even if these considerations are elicited by social norms or reflect the behavior observed in others, it is important to assess the extent to which they emerge as guiding principles for individuals to be used in their further reasoning, for their judgments of the self and others, for their behavioral displays, or for the emotions they experience. Thus, such intrapersonal mechanisms are relevant for questions relating to each of the five research themes we examine.

Interpersonal Mechanisms

The way people relate to others, respond to their moral behaviors, and connect to them tap into interpersonal mechanisms. Again we note that such mechanisms are relevant for research questions in all five research themes, as relations with others can inform the way people reason about morality, the way they judge other individuals or groups, the way they behave, as well as the emotions they experience and the self-views they have.

Intragroup Mechanisms

The role of moral concerns in defining group norms, the tendency of individuals to conform to such norms, and their resulting inclusion versus exclusion from the group all indicate intragroup mechanisms relevant to morality. Considering how groups influence individuals is relevant for our understanding of the way people reason about morality and the way they judge others. It also helps us understand the moral behavior individuals are likely to display (for instance, in public vs. private situations), the emotions they experience in response to the transgression of specific moral rules by themselves or different others, and the self-views they develop about their morality.

Intergroup Mechanisms

The tendency for social groups to endorse specific moral guidelines as a way to define their distinct identity, disagreements between groups about the nature or implications of important values, or moral concerns that stem from conflicts between groups in society all refer to intergroup mechanisms relevant to morality. Here too, examination of such mechanisms is relevant to research questions in each of the five research themes we distinguish. These may inform the tendency to interpret the prescription to be “fair” differently, depending on the identity of the recipients of such fairness, which helps understand people’s moral reasoning and the way they judge the morality of others. Intergroup relations may also help understand the tendency to behave differently toward members of different groups, as well as the emotions and self-views relating to such behaviors.

In sum, we argue that each of these four levels of analysis offers potentially relevant approaches to understand the mechanisms that can shape people’s moral concerns and their judgments of others. Mechanisms at all four levels can also affect moral behavior and have important implications for the emotions people experience and the self-views they hold. Reviewing whether and how empirical research has addressed relevant mechanisms at these four levels thus offers a better understanding of how morality operates in the social regulation of individual behavior (see also Carnes, Lickel, & Janoff-Bulman, 2015 ; Ellemers, 2017 ; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013 ).

Questions Examined

The functionalist perspective we have outlined above is central to how we conceptualize morality in this review. We built a database containing research that is relevant for this review by including all studies in which the authors indicated their research design or measures to speak to issues relating to morality. Thus, we do not limit ourselves to the examination of specific guidelines or behaviors as representing key features of morality, but consider the broad range of situations that can be interpreted in terms of their moral implications (see also Blasi, 1980 ). We argue that many different principles or behaviors can acquire moral overtones, and our main interest is to examine what happens when these are considered as indicating the morally “right” versus “wrong” way to behave in a particular situation. We think this latter aspect reflects the essence of theoretical accounts that have emphasized the ways in which morality and moral judgments regulate the behavior of individuals living in groups ( Rai & Fiske, 2011 ; Tooby & Cosmides, 2010 ). As indicated above, this implies that—given the abstract nature of universal moral values—the specific behavior that is seen as moral can shift, depending on the social context ( Haidt & Graham, 2007 ; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010 ; Rai & Fiske, 2011 ), as well as the relevant norms or features that characterize distinct social groups ( Giner-Sorolla, 2012 ; Greene, 2013 ). Shared moral standards go beyond other behavioral norms in that they are used to define whether an individual can be considered a virtuous and “proper” group member, with social exclusion as the ultimate sanction ( Tooby & Cosmides, 2010 ; see also Ellemers & Van den Bos, 2012 ). In the remainder of this review, we will examine the empirical approaches to examining morality in social psychology from this functionalist perspective:

• Emerging trends: We built a database containing bibliometric characteristics of all studies relevant to our review. This allows us to consider relevant trends in the emergence of published studies, comparing these with general developments in the field of social psychology. We will consider differences in the development of interest in the five types of research questions we distinguish and detail the different mechanisms that are studied to examine questions falling within each of these themes. In this way, we aim to examine the effort researchers have made over the years to understand what they see as the psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior. We also assess whether and how these emerging efforts have addressed the intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup mechanisms relating to morality.
• Influential views: We will identify which (theoretical) publications external to our database are most frequently cited in the empirical publications included in our database. We see these as seminal approaches that have influenced researchers with an interest in morality. We also assess which empirical publications in our database receive the most cross-citations from other researchers on morality and are frequently cited in the broader literature. This will help understand which theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches have been most influential in further developing this area of research.
• Types of studies: We will use standardized bibliometric techniques to identify interrelated clusters of research and characterize the way these clusters differ from each other. We consider the different types of research questions asked in each of the themes we distinguish and relate them to clusters of studies carried out to specify the empirical approaches that have typically been adopted to address questions within each research theme. This elucidates which conclusions can be drawn from the studies that are available to date and how these contribute to broader insights on the psychology of morality.

By considering the empirical literature in this way, we seek to determine whether and how relevant theoretical perspectives on human morality and the types of research questions they raise are reflected in empirical studies carried out. In doing this, we will assess to what extent this work addresses the role of shared identities in the development of moral guidelines, takes into account the limits of self-reported individual dispositions as proxies for moral behaviors, and considers the interplay between moral principles, guidelines, and convictions as “thoughts,” on one hand, and actual behaviors and emotions as “experiences,” on the other.

Data Collection Procedure

The data collection was carried out entirely online using the WoS engine. Information was derived from three databases: the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED, 1945-present), the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI, 1956-present), and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI, 1975-present). These database choices were determined by user account access. The category criterion was set to “Psychology Social.” The search query was “moral*” whereby the results listed all empirical and review articles featuring the word “moral” within the source’s title, keywords, or abstract.

The publications initially found in this way were manually screened to determine whether they should be included in our review of empirical studies on morality. Criteria to include a publication in the set accordingly were (a) that it was an English-language publication, (b) that it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal, (c) that it contained an original report of qualitative or quantitative empirical data (either in a correlational or an experimental design), and (d) that it contained a manipulation or a measure that the authors indicated as relevant to morality.

The complete set of studies examined here was collected in three waves (see Appendix 1, in Supplementary materials ). Each wave consisted of an electronic search using the procedure and inclusion criteria detailed above. The publications that came up in the electronic search were first screened to remove any review or theory papers that did not report original data. The empirical publications that were retained were assessed for relevance to our research question by checking whether the study or studies reported actually included a manipulation or measure that was identified by the authors as relating to morality.

The initial search was done in 2014 and included all publications that had appeared in 2000 through 2013, of which 419 met our inclusion criteria. A second wave of data collection was carried out in 2016 and 2017 to add two more years of empirical publications that had appeared in 2014 and 2015. This yielded 221 additional publications that were included in the set. The data collection was completed with a third wave of data collection conducted in 2018. Here, the same procedure was used to add 275 empirical studies that had been published in 2016 and 2017. In this third wave of data collection, we also searched for publications that had appeared before 2000 and were listed in WoS. This yielded 372 additional studies published from 1940 through 1999. Together, these three waves of data collection yielded a total number of 1,278 studies on morality published from 1940 through 2017 that we collected for this review (see Appendix 2, in Supplementary materials ).

We note that complete records of main publication details are only available from 1981 onward, and complete full-text records of publications in WoS are only available from 1996 onward. This is why statistical trends analyses will only be conducted for studies published from 1981 onward, and full bibliometric analyses can only be carried out for the main body of 989 studies on morality published from 1996 through 2017 for which complete publication details are digitally available.

Data Coding

Coding procedure and interrater reliability.

During the first wave of data collection, a coding scheme was jointly developed by the two first authors. Different coders used this scheme to code groups of publications in different waves of data collection. This was decided by determining the main prediction examined and inspecting the study design and measures that were used. In each phase of data coding, ambiguous cases were flagged, and publication details were further examined and discussed with other coders to reach a joint decision on the most appropriate classification. Each time this occurred, the coding scheme was further specified.

After completion of the third wave of data collection, interrater reliability was determined for the full database included in this review. The codes assigned by five different coders in the first and second wave of data collection, and by six additional coders in the third wave of data collection, were checked by the second group of six coders. An online random number generator was used to randomly select 20 entries for six subsets of years examined (1940 through 2017) that contained about 200 publications each. This resulted in 120 entries (roughly 10% of all publications included) sampled to assess interrater reliability. Each group of 20 entries was then assigned to a second coder and coded in an empty file. Only after completing the 20 entries did the second coder compare their codings with the original codings. The overall interrater agreement was good. For the levels of analysis at which morality was examined, coders were in agreement for 84% of the entries coded. When determining how to classify the main research question under one of the research themes, coders agreed on 84.3% of the entries.

Levels of Analysis

For each entry, we inspected the study design and measures that were used to assess the level at which the mechanism under investigation was located. We distinguish four levels which mirror the categories that are commonly used to characterize different types of mechanisms addressed in social psychological theory (e.g., in textbooks): (a) research on intrapersonal mechanisms, which studies how a single individual considers, evaluates, or makes decisions about rules, objects, situations, and courses of action; (b) research on interpersonal mechanisms, which examines how individuals perceive, evaluate, and interact with other individuals; (c) research on intragroup mechanisms, investigating how people perceive, evaluate, and respond to norms or behaviors displayed by other members of the same group, work or sports team, religious community, or organization; and (d) research on intergroup mechanisms, focusing on how people perceive, evaluate, and interact with members of different cultural, ethnic, or national groups. We also include here research that explicitly aims to examine how members of distinct group differ from each other in how they consider morality.

Interrater agreement was 74% for intrapersonal mechanisms, 83% for interpersonal mechanisms, 92% for intragroup mechanisms, and 88% for intergroup mechanisms.

Research Themes

For each entry, we decided what was the main goal of the research question that was addressed. At the first wave of data collection, the first two authors listed all the keywords provided by the authors of studies included and decided how these could be classified into the five research themes we distinguish in our model. We used this as a starting point to develop our coding scheme, in which ambiguities were resolved through deliberation, as specified above. In this case, coders were instructed to choose a single theme that represented the main focus of the research question in each of the entries included (which could contain multiple studies). Cases where coders thought multiple research themes might be relevant were flagged and further studied and discussed with other coders to determine the primary focus of the research question. Interrater agreement was 68% for moral reasoning, 89% for moral behavior, 84% for moral judgment, 87% for moral self-views, and 95% for moral emotions.

Moral reasoning

Here, we included all research questions that try to capture the moral guidelines people endorse. These include questions about what people consider to be morally right by considering their ideas of what “good” people are generally like or questions about what guidelines people endorse to indicate what a moral person should do. Some researchers aim to examine which choices people think should be made in hypothetical dilemmas and vignettes, asking about people’s positions on specific issues (e.g., gay adoption, killing bugs for science), or wish to assess which values are guiding principles in their life (e.g., fairness, purity). Under this theme, we also classified research questions aiming to examine how moral choices and decisions may differ, depending on specific concerns or situational goals that are activated implicitly (e.g., clean vs. dirty environment) or explicitly (e.g., long-term vs. short-term implications). We note that some of the research questions we included under this theme are labeled by their authors as being about “moral judgment,” as they use this term more broadly than we do. However, in our delineation of the different types of research questions—and in our coding scheme for the five thematic clusters we distinguish—we reserve the term moral judgments for a specific set of research questions, which address the way in which people judge the morality of a another individual or group . Research questions investigating people’s judgments about the general morality of a particular decision or course of action—which capture one’s own moral guidelines—fall under the theme of “moral reasoning” in our coding scheme.

Moral judgments

Under this research theme, we classify all research questions addressing ways in which we evaluate the morality of other individuals or groups. We include research questions examining how the general character of specific individuals is evaluated in terms of perceived closeness of the target to the self or overall positivity/negativity of the target (e.g., in terms of likeability, familiarity, or attractiveness). We also consider under this theme research questions aiming to uncover how people assign moral traits (honesty etc.) or moral responsibility to the individual for the behavior described (guilty, intentionally inflicting harm, deserving of punishment). Similarly, we include research questions addressing the judgments of group targets (existing social groups, companies, communities) in terms of overall positivity/negativity, specific moral traits (e.g., trustworthiness), negative emotions raised, or implicit moral judgments implied in lexical decisions. In this cluster, we also consider research questions addressing the perceived severity of behaviors described, wondering whether people think it merits punishment, or affecting the level of empathy versus dehumanization they experience toward the victims of moral transgressions.

Moral behavior

Here, we include research questions addressing self-reported past behavior or behavioral intentions, as well as reports of (un)cooperative behavior in real life (e.g., volunteering, donating money, helping, forgiving, citizenship) or deceitful behavior in experimental contexts (e.g., cheating, lying, stealing, gossiping). We also include questions addressing implicit indicators of moral behavior (e.g., word completion tendencies, speech pattern analysis, handwipe choices). Research questions under this theme consider these behavioral reports as expressing internalized personal norms, convictions, or beliefs, in relation to indicators of “moral atmosphere,” descriptive or injunctive team or group norms, family rules, or moral role models. We also include under this theme research questions that address moral behavior in relation to situational concerns (e.g., moral rule reminders, cognitive depletion) or specific virtues (e.g., care vs. courage).

Moral emotions

This theme includes research questions in which emotions are considered in response to recollections of real-life events, behaviors, and dilemmas, including significant historical or political events. We also include research questions examining whether such emotions (after being evoked with experimental procedures) can induce participants to display morally questionable behavior (e.g., in a computer game, in response to a provocation by a confederate) or when prompted with situational primes (e.g., pleasant or abhorrent pictures, odors, faces, or transgressive scenarios). Research questions addressing emotional responses people experience in relation to morally relevant issues or situations (guilt, shame, outrage, disgust) are also included under this theme.

Moral self-views

We classified under this research theme all research questions that address the way different aspects of people’s self-views relate to each other (e.g., personality characteristics with self-stated inclinations to display moral behavior), as well as research questions addressing the way experimentally induced behavioral primes, reminders of past (individual or group level) moral transgressions, or the moral superiority of others relate to people’s self-views. This research theme includes research questions addressing personality inventories or trait lists of moral characteristics (e.g., honesty, fairness), as well as self-stated moral motivations or moral ideals (e.g., do not harm) that participants can either explicitly claim as self-defining or implicitly (by examining implicit associations with the self or response times). In addition, we include questions addressing the stated willingness to display moral or immoral behavior (e.g., lie, cheat, help others, donate money or blood), which is also used to indicate the occurrence of moral justifications or moral disengagement to maintain a moral self-view.

Bibliometric Procedures

Temporal trends and impact development.

The data on relevant publications included in this review were linked to the bibliometric WoS database present at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University ( Moed, De Bruin, & Van Leeuwen, 1995 ; Van Leeuwen, 2013 ; Waltman, Van Eck, Van Leeuwen, Visser, & Van Raan, 2011a , 2011b ). At the time these analyses were prepared, the CWTS in-house database contained relevant indicators for records covering the period 1981 through 2017 (see Appendix 3, in Supplementary materials ).

Seminal Publications

We identified two types of seminal publications. First, we assessed which (theoretical or empirical) publications outside our set (excluding methodological publications) are most frequently cited in the publications we examined. Second, we determined which of the empirical publications within our set have received an outstanding number of citations, within the field of morality research, as well as in the wider environment (the general WoS database).

In both cases, the analysis of seminal papers was conducted in three steps. First, we detected publications that were highly cited within this set of studies on morality and recorded in which research theme they were located. Second, within each research theme, we focused on the top 25 most highly cited publications from outside the set and—reflecting the smaller number of publications to choose from—the top 10 most highly cited publications within the set of studies on morality. We then identified how many citations these had received in the publications included in this review to determine a top three of seminal papers outside this set and a top three of seminal papers within this set, for each of the five research themes represented. We also examined how frequently these seminal papers were cited in the wider context of the whole WoS database.

Clusters of Approaches

We used VOSviewer as a tool ( Van Eck & Waltman, 2010 , 2014 , 2018 ) for mapping and clustering ( Waltman, Van Eck, & Noyons, 2010 ) to visualize the content structure in the descriptions of empirical research on morality that we selected for this review. The analysis determines co-occurrences of so-called noun phrase groups in the titles and abstracts of the publications included in the analysis. Because full records of titles and abstracts are only available for studies published from 1996 onward, this analysis could only be conducted for the set of studies published from 1996 through 2017. Co-occurrences of noun phrase groups are indicated as clusters in a two-dimensional space where (a) closeness (vs. distance) between words indicates their relatedness, (b) larger font size of terms generally indicates a higher frequency of occurrence, and (c) shared color codes indicate stronger interrelations. We use these clusters to indicate the empirical approaches described in the titles and abstracts of studies included in this review and relate these to the different types of research questions we classified into five themes.

Trends in Presence and Impact

When we compare trends in publication rates over time, we see that in social psychology publications have increased from about 1,500 per year in 1981 to 4,000 per year since 2014. The absolute numbers in publications on morality included in our review are much lower: Here, we found 10 publications per year in 1981, increasing to over 100 per year since 2014. Thus, the absolute number of publications on morality research remains relatively small compared with the whole field of social psychology. Yet, in comparison, the increase is much steeper for publications on morality, when both trends are indexed relative to the number observed in 1981 (see Figure 2 ). The regression coefficient is considerably larger for publications on morality (0.27) than for publications on social psychology (0.04). The R 2 further indicates that a linear trend explains 85% of the overall increase observed in publications on social psychology, while the trend in studies on morality is less well captured with a linear equation ( R 2 = .54). Indeed, the increase in the number of publications on morality that were published from 2005 onward is much steeper than before, with a regression coefficient of 1.22 and an R 2 for this linear trend of .9.

Indexed trends and regression coefficients for social psychology as a field and morality as a specialism, WoS, 1981-2017.

Note. WoS = Web of Science.

When we assess the impact of the studies on morality included in our review, we see the average impact of these publications, the journals in which they are published, and the percentage of top-cited publications going up consistently (see Figure 3 ). These field-normalized scores show that the impact of studies on morality is clearly above the average in the field, since 2005. At the same time, there is a steady decrease in the percentage of uncited papers, as well as the proportion of self-citations, and increasing collaboration between authors from different countries (see supplementary materials ).

Trends in impact scores in morality, WoS, 1981-2017, indicating the average normalized number of citations (excluding self-citations; mncs), the average normalized citation score of the journals in which these papers are published (mnjs), and the proportion of papers belonging to the top 10% in the field where they were published (pp_top_perc).

Emerging Themes

When we distinguish between the types of research questions addressed, this reveals that across the board, there is a disproportionate interest in research questions relating to moral reasoning (χ 2 = 502.19, df = 4, p < .001). In fact this is the most frequently examined research theme throughout the period examined and has yielded between 35 and 60 publications per year during the past few years. Research questions relating to moral judgments were initially examined less frequently, but from 2013 onward with 30 to 40 publications per year this research theme approaches similar levels of research activity as moral reasoning. The steady stream of publications examining questions relating to moral behavior peaked around 2014 when more than 30 publications were devoted to this research theme, but subsequently this has dropped down to roughly 20 publications per year. Publications on research questions relating to moral emotions and moral self-views have increased during the past few years; however, these remain relatively less examined overall, with around 10 publications per year addressing each of these themes. When we compare how these themes developed since the interest of researchers in examining morality increased so rapidly after 2005, we clearly see these differential trends. During this period, the number of studies addressing moral reasoning increases more quickly than studies on moral judgments, as well as—in decreasing order—moral behavior, moral self-views, and moral emotions (see Figure 4 ).

Comparative trends in the development of research themes in morality research, 2005-2017.

Mechanisms Examined

In a similar vein, we assessed trends visible in the intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup levels of mechanisms examined in the studies included in our review. Overall, the interest in these different types of mechanisms is not distributed evenly (χ 2 = 688.43, df = 3, p < .001). Most of the studies included in this review have addressed intrapersonal mechanisms relating to morality, and the relative preference for examining mechanisms relevant to morality at the intrapersonal level has only increased during the past years. The number of studies since 2005 examining intragroup mechanisms show a steep linear trend that accounts for the majority of variance observed (regression coefficient: 6.35, R 2 = .78). Although interpersonal mechanisms were initially less examined, the increased research interest in morality since 2005 is also visible in the number of studies that have addressed such mechanisms (regression coefficient: 3.09, R 2 = .85). However across the board, the examination of intragroup mechanisms remains relatively rare in this literature, with less than 10 studies per year addressing such issues. Here, the regression coefficient is much lower (0.59) and matches the observed variance less well ( R 2 = .64). The examination of intergroup mechanisms is only slightly more popular; however, a linear trend (with a regression coefficient of 0.76) does not explain this trend very well ( R 2 = .25).

When we assess this per research theme (see Figure 5 ), we see that the strong emphasis on intrapersonal mechanisms that is visible across all research themes is less pronounced in research questions addressing moral judgments (χ 2 = 249.48, df = 12, p < .001). In research on moral judgments, the interest in interpersonal mechanisms is much larger. In fact this research theme accounts for the majority of the studies in our review that examine interpersonal mechanisms. The interest in intragroup mechanisms is very rare across the board. It is perhaps most clearly visible in research questions relating to moral behavior. The interest in intergroup mechanisms is relatively small, but more or less the same across the five research themes we examined.

Number of studies addressing mechanisms at different levels of analysis, specified per research theme, 1940 – 2017.

In the seminal publications outside the set (see Table 2 ), one publication comes up as a top three seminal paper in more than one research theme. This is the publication by Haidt (2001) in which he develops his theory on moral intuition. Clearly, this publication has been highly influential in developing this area of research. It has also been extremely well cited in the WoS database more generally and can be seen as an important development that prompted the increased interest in research on morality during the past 10 to 15 years. However, besides this one paper, there is no overlap between the five research themes in the top three seminal publications that characterize them. This substantiates our reasoning that different clusters of research questions can be distinguished and underlines the validity of the criteria we used to classify the studies reviewed into these five themes.

Top-three Seminal Papers for Each Research Theme, Published Outside the Set.

Note. The rank order within each theme is specified according to the number of citations within the data set examined, which not always corresponds to the total number of citations in WoS. We consider publications as seminal to research on morality when they attract at least 10 citations within the data set examined. As a result of this criterion, we only identified two external papers that were seminal to research on moral self-views. WoS = Web of Science.

Going through the five themes and their top three seminal papers additionally revealed that there are two empirical studies that have been highly influential in this literature. These are not included in our set because they were not published in a psychology journal and hence did not meet our inclusion criteria. In fact, part of the appeal in citing the fMRI study by Greene et al. (2001) in research on moral reasoning or the physical cleansing study by Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) in research on moral self-views may be that these were published in the extremely coveted journal Science —which is not a regular outlet for researchers in social psychology. Indeed, there has been some concern that these high visibility publications—and the media attention they attracted—have led multiple researchers to adopt this same methodology for further studies, perhaps hoping to achieve similar success ( Bauman et al., 2014 ; Graham, 2014 ; Mooijman & Van Dijk, 2015 ). The drawback of this publication strategy is that this may have led many researchers to continue examining different conditions affecting trolley dilemma and handwipe choices, instead of broadening their investigations to other issues relating to morality ( Hofmann et al., 2014 ; Lovett et al., 2015 ).

In the research on moral reasoning , besides Haidt’s (2001) theory on moral intuition and the fMRI study by Greene et al. (2001) discussed above, the third highly cited review paper addresses political ideologies. This publication by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003) reports a meta-analysis examining how individual differences (e.g., authoritarianism, need for closure) correlate with conservative ideologies across 88 research samples in 12 countries. The relationship between moral reasoning and political ideologies is also an important topic in empirical work in this research theme. Indeed, the empirical publication that is most often cited in the WoS database (see Table 3 ) reports a series of studies that connects the primacy of different moral foundations (e.g., fairness, harm, authority) to liberal versus conservative political views of specific individuals ( Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009 ). The high visibility and impact of the work of John Haidt and his collaborators in research on moral reasoning are further evidenced by the other two empirical publications that come up as most highly cited in our review of this research theme. These report data used for the development and validation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire ( Graham et al., 2011 ) and research revealing cultural differences in the issues people consider moral and the way they respond to them ( Haidt et al., 1993 ).

Top-three Seminal Papers, Published Within the Set, for Each Research Theme.

Note. The rank order within each theme is specified according to the total number of citations in WoS, which not always corresponds to the number of citations within the data set examined. WoS = Web of Science.

Research on moral judgments essentially examines the assignment of good versus bad intentions to others, for instance, based on their observed behaviors. An influential theoretical model guiding work in this area argues that people’s perceived intentions and abilities form two key dimensions in social impression formation ( Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ). In addition, many researchers in this area have referred to the work of Gray et al. (2012 , see Table 2 ) who consider the intentional perpetration of interpersonal harm—which requires the assignment of mental capacities to others—as a hallmark of human morality. Among the empirical studies examining these issues, the classic research by Reeder and Spores (1983) , which examines how situational information affects the perceived morality of individual actors, has become a seminal publication. A more recent study highly cited within this research theme was conducted by G. P. Goodwin, Piazza, and Rozin (2014) on the primacy of morality in person perception (see Table 3 ). The influence of Haidt’s (2001) seminal publication on moral intuition in this research theme is visible in a frequently cited study by Haidt and colleagues on the role of disgust as a form of embodied moral judgment ( Schnall et al., 2008 ; see Table 3 ).

In moral behavior , the most highly cited theory papers emphasize the connection between conceptualizations of the moral self and displays of moral behavior. In addition to the classic review paper arguing for this connection ( Blasi, 1980 ), many studies in this research theme refer to the different strategies people can use to maintain their self-concept of being a moral person, even if they are not immune to moral lapses ( Mazar et al., 2008 ). Seminal studies within this research theme reveal the implications of the connection between moral self-views and moral behaviors, which is in line with relations between research themes visualized in Figure 1 . Accordingly, the most frequently cited publications reveal that even well-meaning individuals can display unethical behavior as their self-control becomes depleted ( Gino, Schweitzer, Mead, & Ariely, 2011 ). In addition, research elucidates the different strategies people can use to disengage from their moral lapses ( Bandura et al., 1996 ). The possible implications are demonstrated empirically, for instance, in work showing that people freely express prejudice once they have established their moral credentials ( Monin & Miller, 2001 ).

In the research theme on moral emotions , the most highly cited theory papers focus on the experience of guilt and shame as relevant self-condemning emotions, indicating how people reflect upon and experience moral transgressions associated with the self . These exemplify the social implications of moral behavior and are generally considered uniquely diagnostic for human morality ( Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1994 ; Tangney, Miller, Flicker, & Barlow, 1996 ; Tangney et al., 2007 ). However, the most highly cited empirical publications drawing from these theoretical perspectives all address disgust as a response, indicating that other individuals or situational contexts are considered impure and should be avoided ( Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009 ; Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999 ; Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009 ).

Finally, the studies on moral self-views comprise a relatively small and dispersed research theme, which is not characterized by a specific theoretical perspective. This is also exemplified by the fact that we only found two papers external to the set that met our criteria for being considered seminal. Researchers working on this theme most often cite the study of Zhong and Liljenquist (2006) , suggesting that people engage in symbolically cleansing acts to alleviate threats to their moral self-image. In addition, the seminal paper by Haidt (2001) is frequently cited by publications in this research theme. Empirical publications on moral self-views that have attracted many citations also from outside the morality literature include a validation study of the moral identity scale ( Aquino & Reed, 2002 ), a series of studies documenting the importance of morality for people’s group-based identities ( Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007 ), and a classic study on gender differences in moral self-views ( Ford & Lowery, 1986 ).

We examined the interrelations and clusters of research approaches in the studies reviewed, on the basis of titles and abstracts for 989 studies in our set, published in 1996 through 2017 (see Figure 6 ). The first cluster, containing 107 interrelated terms (indicated in red— Experiments and actions ), contains studies examining a variety of actions and their consequences in experimental research. The second cluster contains 70 terms (indicated in orange— Individual and group differences ) capturing studies on personality and individual differences as well as differences between social groups in correlational research. The third cluster connects 48 terms (indicated in pink— Rule endorsement ) referring to studies on justice and fairness, authority, and moral foundations. The fourth cluster contains 26 terms (indicated in turquoise— Harm perpetrated ) indicating responses to violation and harm. The fifth cluster contains seven terms (indicated in purple— Norms and intentions ) referring to norms and deliberate intentions in planned behavior.

Publications on morality, 1996-2017.

Note. Clustering and interrelations based on content analysis of publication titles and abstracts.

These clusters help us characterize the studies conducted within each of the research themes we distinguish in this review. We assess this by examining overlay “heat maps” indicating the density of studies within each research theme (ranging from low—blue to yellow—high) by projecting them on the clusters of research approaches outlined above (see supplementary materials ).

The overlay map for research on moral reasoning connects clusters of research relating to individual and group differences (orange) and rule endorsement (pink). However, studies on moral reasoning have largely neglected to examine how such reasoning relates to actions in experimental contexts (red), harm perpetrated (turquoise), or norms and intentions (purple). Studies on moral judgments by contrast mainly involve experiments and examine actions (red) as well as harm perpetrated (turquoise). However, research addressing questions on moral judgments has been less concerned about examining individual and group differences (orange), rule endorsement (pink), or norms and intentions (purple). Research on moral behavior has most frequently addressed norms and intentions (purple), and to a lesser extent experiments and actions (red) and individual and group differences (orange). Researchers in this area have not systematically examined rule endorsement (pink) or harm perpetrated (turquoise). The research on moral emotions is mostly carried out in relation to harm perpetrated (turquoise), which is examined in terms of experiments and actions (red), rather than individual and group differences (orange). Rule endorsement (pink) and norms and intentions (purple) are rarely taken into account. The research on moral self-views connects approaches addressing individual and group differences (orange), experiments and actions (red), and harm perpetrated (turquoise), but is less concerned with rule endorsement (pink) or norms and intentions (purple).

Conclusions Emerging From Five Research Themes

The quantitative analyses reported above have allowed us to specify the overall characteristics of the studies included in our review, in terms of their most influential publications as well as most frequently used research approaches. We will now consider how the nature of the research questions addressed in the studies reviewed and the empirical approaches that were used affect current insights on the psychology of morality.

This is by far the most popular research theme in the empirical literature on morality, and this preference has only intensified over the years. Research based on Haidt and Graham’s (2007) moral foundations theory has established that conservatives in the United States are more likely to show support for civil rights restrictions ( Crowson & DeBacker, 2008 ), to have a prevention focus ( Cornwell & Higgins, 2013 ), and to perceive moral clarity ( Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012 ) than liberals. This not only predicts their political voting behavior and candidate preferences ( Skitka & Bauman, 2008 ) but also relates to more general tendencies in how individuals relate to others, as indicated by their social dominance orientation, authoritarianism ( Federico, Weber, Ergun, & Hunt, 2013 ), or parenting styles ( McAdams et al., 2008 ).

However, research on this theme also reveals how the moral principles people endorse relate to their life experiences, family roles, and position in society. For instance, exposure to war ( Haskuka, Sunar, & Alp, 2008 ) or abusive/dysfunctional family relations ( Caselles & Milner, 2000 ) impedes moral reasoning. More generally, many studies have shown that the moral judgments people make depend on their age, gender (e.g., Kray & Haselhuhn, 2012 ; Skoe, Cumberland, Eisenberg, Hansen, & Perry, 2002 ), parental status, education, multicultural experiences ( Lin, 2009 ), war experiences, family experiences, or religious status ( Simpson, Piazza, & Rios, 2016 ).

While this work attests to the power and resilience of moral convictions, at the same time, there is an abundance of evidence that people are not very consistent in their moral reasoning. Indeed, it has clearly been demonstrated that moral reasoning also depends on the way a moral dilemma is framed or specific concerns that are (implicitly) primed. Such primes can make salient the monetary cost of their decisions (e.g., Irwin & Baron, 2001 ), the intentions and goals of the actors involved, the harm done as a result of their actions ( Sabini & Monterosso, 2003 ), or specific events in history ( Lv & Huang, 2012 ). But also more subtle and implicit cues can have far-reaching effects for moral reasoning. For instance, the moral acceptability of the same course of action differs depending on whether people are implicitly prompted to focus on their head (vs. their heart; Fetterman & Robinson, 2013 ), on cleanliness ( Zhong, Strejcek, & Sivanathan, 2010 ), on approach versus avoidance ( Broeders, Van Den Bos, Müller, & Ham, 2011 ; Janoff-Bulman, Sheikh, & Hepp, 2009 ; Moore, Stevens, & Conway, 2011 ), on the present versus the future, or on own learning versus the education of others ( Tichy, Johnson, Johnson, & Roseth, 2010 ).

In sum, the accumulated research on moral reasoning has led to two types of conclusions. First, it has been extensively documented that different social roles and life experiences can have a long-term impact on the way people reason about morality and the moral principles they prioritize. Second, more immediate situational cues also affect moral reasoning and moral decisions. Both these conclusions from studies on moral reasoning complement philosophical analyses as well as evolutionary accounts emphasizing the objective survival value of adhering to specific principles or guidelines.

Studies on moral judgments generally attest to the fact that information about morality weighs more heavily in determining overall impressions of others than diagnostic information pertaining to behavioral domains such as competence or sociability (e.g., S. Chen, Ybarra, & Kiefer, 2004 ). This is the case for evaluations of individuals, as well as for groups and organizations. Information about morality is seen as being more predictive of behavior in a range of situations ( Pagliaro, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2011 ) and more likely to reflect on other members of the same group ( Brambilla, 2012 ). However, people find it easy to accept lapses or shortcomings as indicating moral decline, while they require more evidence to be convinced of people’s moral improvement ( Klein & O’Brien, 2016 ). Furthermore, the relative importance people attach to specific features may differ, depending, for instance, on the cultural context (e.g., Chinese vs. Western) in which this is assessed ( F. F. Chen, Jing, Lee, & Bai, 2016 ; X. Chen & Chiu, 2010 ).

Inferences about people’s good intentions—presumably indicating their morality—are often derived from features indicating agreeableness and communality. Individuals are seen as moral when they can make agentic motives compatible with communal motives, for instance, by displaying self-control, honesty, reliability, other-orientedness, and dependability ( Frimer, Walker, Lee, Riches, & Dunlop, 2012 ). Whether this is perceived to be the case also depends on situational cues such as the harm done to others (e.g., Guglielmo & Malle, 2010 ), the benefit to the self ( Inbar, Pizarro, & Cushman, 2012 ), or the perceived intentionality of the behavior that has led to such outcomes (e.g., Greitemeyer & Weiner, 2008 ; Reeder, Kumar, Hesson-McInnis, & Trafimow, 2002 ).

Other target characteristics (such as their social status or their national, religious, cultural, or sexual identity; e.g., Cramwinckel, van den Bos, van Dijk, & Schut, 2016 ), as well as contextual guidelines (e.g., instructing people to focus on the action vs. the person; duties vs. ideals; appearance vs. behavior of the target) may also color the way research participants interpret and value concrete information about specific targets ( Heflick, Goldenberg, Cooper, & Puvia, 2011 ). Even unrelated contextual cues may have such effects, for instance, when information is presented on a black-and-white background ( Zarkadi & Schnall, 2013 ) or when research participants are positively or negatively primed with a specific odor, mood induction, or room temperature (e.g., Schnall et al., 2008 ).

In addition, judgments of other individuals and groups also depend on the physical and psychological closeness of these targets to the self (e.g., Cramwinckel, van Dijk, Scheepers, & van den Bos, 2013 ; Haidt, Rosenberg, & Hom, 2003 ). Self-anchoring, self-distancing, and self-justifying effects can all be raised when moral judgments about others can be seen to reflect upon own social class or race, one’s personal convictions, the salience of specific social roles (e.g., as a parent, Eibach, Libby, & Ehrlinger, 2009 ; as a subordinate, Bauman, Tost, & Ong, 2016 ), or any group memberships that is seen as self-defining (e.g., Iyer, Jetten, & Haslam, 2012 ). Related concerns can lead people to protect just-world beliefs ( Gray & Wegner, 2010 ) by dehumanizing stigmatized targets (e.g., Cameron, Harris, & Payne, 2016 ; Riva, Brambilla, & Vaes, 2016 ), increasing their physical distance from them, pointing to moral failures they or other group members have displayed in the past, or referring to “natural” differences that justify differential treatment (e.g., Kteily, Hodson, & Bruneau, 2016 ).

In sum, even if people are strongly inclined to evaluate the moral stature of others they encounter, research in this area reveals that the morality of other individuals and groups is largely in the eye of the beholder. In general, people find it easier to acknowledge the moral questionability of specific behaviors, when these are perpetrated by an individual or group that is more distant from the self. Self-protective mechanisms can also lead people to reduce the moral standing of victims of immoral behavior or alleviate the blame placed on perpetrators.

Studies on moral behavior have often addressed the interplay between individual moral guidelines, on one hand, and social norms, on the other. This is examined, for instance, in studies on moral rebels and moral courage—those who stand up for their own principles ( Sonnentag & McDaniel, 2013 )—as well as moral entrepreneurs and people engaged in moral exporting—those who actively seek to convince others of their own moral principles ( Peterson, Smith, Tannenbaum, & Shaw, 2009 ). Research shows that the strength of personal moral beliefs, attitudes, or convictions can make people resilient against social pressures ( Brezina & Piquero, 2007 ; Hornsey, Majkut, Terry, & McKimmie, 2003 ; Langdridge, Sheeran, & Connolly, 2007 ). However, in domains where personal moral convictions are less strong, moral norms (indicated by team atmosphere or principled leadership) can also overrule individual concerns (e.g., Fernandez-Dols et al., 2010 ). At the same time, it has been documented that social pressures can tempt people either to behave less morally (e.g., M. A. Barnett, Sanborn, & Shane, 2005 ) or to display more group-serving (instead of selfish) behavior (e.g., Osswald, Greitemeyer, Fischer, & Frey, 2010 ), depending on what these norms prescribe ( Ellemers, Pagliaro, Barreto, & Leach, 2008 ).

Research has also revealed that once their moral standing is affirmed, people more easily fall prey to “moral licensing” tendencies. This can even happen vicariously. For instance, it has been demonstrated that people are more likely to display prejudice and bias in hiring decisions after having seen that other members of their group have hired an ethnic minority applicant for a vacant position ( Kouchaki, 2011 ). Yet, positive emotional states resulting from immoral behavior (such as “cheater’s high”; Ruedy, Moore, Gino, & Schweitzer, 2013 , or “hubristic pride,” for example, Bureau, Vallerand, Ntoumanis, & Lafreniere, 2013 ) occur only rarely. Instead, most studies show that people find it aversive to realize they have behaved immorally and have documented different compensatory strategies that can be displayed (e.g., Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli, & Regalia, 2001 ). For instance, confronting people with moral lapses (of themselves and others) impairs the recall, cognitive salience, and perceived applicability of moral rules (“moral disengagement”; Bandura, 1999 ; Fiske, 2009 ). When caught in a moral transgression, people emphasize that this behavior does not reflect their true intention or identity ( Conway & Peetz, 2012 ) or speculate that others are likely to do even worse (“moral hypocrisy”; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2007 ; Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2008 ).

In sum, research on moral behavior demonstrates that people can be highly motivated to behave morally. Yet, personal convictions, social rules and normative pressures from others, or motivational lapses may all induce behavior that is not considered moral by others and invite self-justifying responses to maintain moral self-views.

The intensity of emotional responses to the moral acts of the self and others has been shown to depend on the nature of the situation (importance of the moral dilemma, distance in time, resulting from action vs. inaction; Kedia & Hilton, 2011 ), as well as on specific characteristics of the victim or target of morally questionable acts (e.g., perceived vulnerability, physical proximity; Dijker, 2010 ). These include factors relating to the self (experience of pride; Camacho, Higgins, & Luger, 2003 ), to the social situation (social validation of action perpetrated), or to the victim of the transgression (dubious moral character; Jiang et al., 2011 ). All these situational characteristics may buffer people against the emotional costs of witnessing or perpetrating immoral acts.

Research has further examined the antecedents and implications of specific emotions. This has revealed that disgust can elicit (symbolic) cleansing behaviors ( Gollwitzer & Melzer, 2012 ) and is raised in response to various health cues (e.g., relating to taste sensitivity— Skarlicki, Hoegg, Aquino, & Nadisic, 2013 —sexuality, or pathogens). However, such disgust is not necessarily related to morality ( Tybur et al., 2009 ). Other studies have addressed moral anger, which has been associated with the tendency to aggress against others (protest, Cronin, Reysen, & Branscombe, 2012 ; scapegoating and retribution, Rothschild, Landau, Molina, Branscombe, & Sullivan, 2013 ) or attempts to restore moral order (e.g., Pagano & Huo, 2007 ).

In this literature, guilt and/or shame emerge as self-reflective emotions that uniquely indicate the felt moral implications of actions perpetrated by the self (or others that imply the self, for example, ingroup members). Shame and guilt each have their specific properties and effects (e.g., Sheikh & Janoff-Bulman, 2010 ; Smith, Webster, Parrott, & Eyre, 2002 ). Shame is more clearly associated with the Behavioral Inhibition System, related to public exposure, blushing, and (in problem populations) anxiety and substance abuse. Guilt relates more clearly to the Behavioral Activation System and is related to private beliefs, empathy, and (in problem populations) religious activities. Nevertheless, both shame and guilt have been found to relate specifically to justice violations rather than other types of negative experiences (e.g., Agerström, Björklund, & Carlsson, 2012 ). Furthermore, the experience of guilt and/or shame is associated with endorsing victim compensation and support and reparation efforts (e.g., Pagano & Huo, 2007 ) but does not necessarily elicit other forms of prosocial behavior (e.g., De Hooge, Nelissen, Breugelmans, & Zeelenberg, 2011 ).

In sum, both the intensity and the nature of emotions reported indicate the extent to which people experience situations encountered by themselves and others as having moral implications and as requiring action to enact moral guidelines or redress past injustices. The secondary, uniquely human, and self-reflective emotions of guilt and shame appear to be particularly important in this process.

In this literature, “concern for others,” derived from self-proclaimed levels of agreeableness or communion, are seen to indicate people’s moral character. Accordingly, much of the research on moral self-views has assessed self-proclaimed levels of honesty/humility or warmth/care (contained, for instance, in Lee and Ashton’s (2004) HEXACO-PI or Aquino and Reed’s (2002) “moral identity” scale). Individuals who combine a focus on agency and goal achievement with expressions of communion and care for others are seen as “moral exemplars” (e.g., Frimer, Walker, Dunlop, Lee, & Riches, 2011 ). When such moral behavior is displayed by others, this can also increase people’s confidence in their own ability to act morally (e.g., Aquino, McFerran, & Laven, 2011 ).

Different studies have established that self-reported character traits correlate with accounts of delinquency, unethical business decisions, or forgiveness provided by research participants (e.g., Cohen, Panter, Turan, Morse, & Kim, 2013 ). In addition, the moral self-views people report have been found to converge with actual behavioral displays (e.g., cheating vs. helping others) during experimental tasks in the lab (e.g., Stets & Carter, 2011 ). However, results from this research also suggest that people deliberately use such acts to communicate their good moral intentions, for instance, by donating money after lying ( Mulder & Aquino, 2013 ) or demonstrating that they resist pressure from others to behave immorally ( Carter, 2013 ).

Unfortunately, this tendency to self-present as being morally good can also prevent people from acknowledging their moral lapses. Indeed, after behaving in ways that violate moral standards (violence, delinquency, unethical decision making), people have been found to display a range of moral disengagement strategies. These include placing the event at a more distant point in time or describing it in more abstract terms ( Lammers, 2012 ), rationalizing one’s behavior by invoking a more distant moral purpose ( Aquino, Reed, Thau, & Freeman, 2007 ), or dehumanizing those who suffered from it ( Monroe, 2008 ). In a similar vein, actions that call into question the moral integrity and standards of one’s ingroup have been found to invite negative attitudes (prejudice), emotions (outrage), and behaviors (intolerance) directed toward the outgroup (e.g., Täuber & Zomeren, 2013 ).

In sum, this literature suggests that people reflect on their moral character and how they present this in their self-descriptions as well as in acts they can use to convey their moral intentions. However, the available evidence shows this may primarily lead them to preserve moral self-regard instead of making them improve or prevent morally questionable behaviors. Indeed, the focus on communality and concern for others as indicators of moral character may be too broad to provide sufficient guidance on how to act morally in specific situations.

Discussion and Future Directions

The past years have witnessed a marked increase in the interest of (social) psychologists in “morality” as a topic for empirical research. Our bibliometric analysis reveals the increasing maturity of this area of scientific inquiry, in terms of amount of research effort invested and relative impact. Yet, overviews that are still often cited are by now outdated in terms of the studies covered ( Blasi, 1980 , reviewing 71 studies) or have tended to focus on specific issues or research themes (e.g., Bauman et al., 2014 ).

Observed Trends and Neglected Issues

Substantial knowledge has accumulated about the way people think about morality; however, we know much less about how this affects their moral behavior . We draw this conclusion based on the observation that by far most of the published studies in our review have addressed issues relating to moral reasoning—what people consider right and wrong ways to behave. Furthermore, many researchers have examined the judgments we make about the moral behaviors of other individuals and groups. Of course, these are important research themes in their own right. However, part of the interest of social psychological researchers in the topic of morality stems from the fact that moral reasoning and moral judgments of others are seen to inform the choices people make in their own moral behaviors, as is also visualized in Figure 1 . Yet, we see that studies on moral reasoning and moral judgments have tended to focus on a limited number of specific research questions, methodologies, and approaches, which are not clearly connected to each other or to other research themes.

As a result, current insights on moral reasoning mostly pertain to relatively abstract principles (such as “fairness”) that people can subscribe to, as well as individual differences in which moral guidelines they endorse. The concrete implications of these general principles for specific situations remain less considered. Research on moral judgments complements this by addressing people’s situational experiences, for instance, resulting from concrete choices or behaviors displayed by others. However, these more specific judgments are not systematically traced back to the general moral principles that might inform them or the (dis)agreement that may exist about how to prioritize these.

Research on moral behavior and moral self-views has examined a broader range of issues and is less bound to specific research paradigms and approaches. Accordingly, researchers examining these topics have been more successful in connecting different clusters of research—validating the central role assigned to such research questions in Figure 1 . Nevertheless, overall these integrative empirical approaches have received much less interest from researchers examining issues in morality and have remained relatively dispersed. In fact, we were unable to clearly identify a seminal theoretical approach that has guided research on moral self-views. We suspect this may be a side-effect of some highly visible research paradigms and successful measures that are cited and followed up by many researchers.

Imbalance in Research Themes Addressed and Mechanisms Examined

A second conclusion relates to the choices researchers have made in directing their efforts to examine different issues relating to morality. Our classification of this body of research into distinct themes addressed and types of mechanisms examined has allowed us to quantify and characterize these choices. The comparison of studies carried out to address different research themes revealed that a large part of this literature is relatively limited in terms of the questions raised and the type of methodologies that are used. As a result, the concrete value of the detailed knowledge we have accumulated about moral reasoning and moral judgments as antecedent conditions for moral behavior unfortunately has remained hypothetical. That is, emerging insights into the way people think about morality and moral behavior have not systematically been followed through by assessing how broader guidelines and principles actually inform behavior, emotions, and self-views. Instead, these latter types of studies are relatively rare. Similarly, the literature reviewed here yields relatively little insight into the way behavior, emotions, and self-views feed back into the development of people’s moral reasoning over time. Nor does this body of work systematically address how people’s own experiences affect their judgments of others. These process-oriented and integrative questions constitute promising avenues for future research.

Our decision to classify published studies in terms of the level of analysis adopted has additionally revealed that the mechanisms examined (e.g., how the moral principles people subscribe to relate to the moral intentions they report) are mostly located at the intrapersonal level. In addition, there is a considerable body of research that examines interpersonal mechanisms in particular in studies examining how these relate to the impressions we form of others. However, much less research effort has been devoted to examining how people may come to share the same moral values or how members of different groups in society respond to each other’s moral value endorsements. Yet, the studies that adopt such an approach have clearly established that intragroup mechanisms can and do play a role, also in the moral reasoning individuals develop. Furthermore, research has shown that individuals adapt the moral principles they prioritize, depending on group identities and salient concerns these prescribe. Bicultural individuals, for instance, have been found to shift between prioritizing autonomy or community concerns in their moral reasoning, depending on which of their cultural identities is more salient in the situation they encounter ( Fu, Chiu, Morris, & Young, 2007 ).

Because studies taking this type of approach are so rare, our understanding of when and how people converge toward shared moral views, how they influence each other in adapting their moral convictions, and how social sanctions and rewards are used to make individuals adhere to shared moral norms has largely remained uncharted territory. Yet, these latter types of questions are those that guide the public debate on morality—and are often cited as a source of inspiration by researchers in this area. Similarly, relatively few researchers have addressed intergroup mechanisms, even though their relevance—for instance, for moral reasoning—is revealed in work showing that group memberships define the “moral circles” in which people are afforded or denied deservingness of moral treatment (e.g., Olson, Cheung, Conway, Hutchison, & Hafer, 2011 ; see also Ellemers, 2017 ).

The relative neglect of intragroup and intergroup mechanisms in this literature is all the more striking because different theoretical approaches—that are frequently cited by researchers working on morality—emphasize that moral principles are considered so important because they indicate shared notions about “right” and “wrong” that regulate the behavior of individuals. Indeed, prominent approaches to morality commonly acknowledge that general moral principles such as the “golden rule” can be interpreted differently in different contexts or by groups of people who translate these into specific behavioral guidelines (e.g., Churchland, 2011 ; Giner-Sorolla, 2012 ; Greene, 2013 ; Haidt & Graham, 2007 ; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010 ; Harvey & Callan, 2014 ). This is also the key message of the seminal study on moral reasoning by Haidt et al. (1993) . Such group-specific interpretations of the same universal values also help to explain why conflicts about moral issues are so stressful and difficult to resolve (see also Ellemers, 2017 ; Ellemers & Van der Toorn, 2015 ). Yet, researchers have only recently begun to examine these issues more systematically (e.g., Rom & Conway, 2018 ).

Thus, the imbalance observed in research themes addressed and levels of analysis at which relevant mechanisms have been examined reveal an important discrepancy between empirical research on morality and leading theoretical approaches that emphasize the importance of morality for group life and for individuals living together in communities (e.g., Gert, 1988 ; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013 ; Rai & Fiske, 2011 ; Tooby & Cosmides, 2010 ). As a result, we know a lot about intrapersonal and some about interpersonal considerations relating to morality, but have relatively little insight into the social functions of morality (see also Ellemers & Van den Bos, 2012 ) that also incorporate relevant mechanisms pertaining to intragroup dynamics and intergroup processes.

Key Characteristics of Human Morality Remain Underexamined in Research

A third conclusion emerging from this review is that there is a disjoint between seminal theoretical approaches to human morality and empirical work that is carried out. Our identification of seminal publications revealed that the theoretical perspectives that we have used to derive key characteristics of human morality are also the ones that are frequently cited by researchers in this area. However, closer inspection of the research included in our review reveals that the studies these researchers conducted do not systematically address or reflect the key features characterizing foundational theoretical approaches. This is visible in different ways.

To begin with, the notion that shared identities shape the development of specific moral guidelines, which in turn inform the behavioral regulation of individuals living in social groups, is a key feature identified by different approaches seeking to understand the psychology of morality. Yet, cluster analysis of the studies carried out to examine this reveals that empirical approaches tend to focus either on the identification of general principles and individuals who endorse them or on the impact of specific norms and how these affect the choices people make in concrete realities. However, they mostly do this while neglecting to examine how moral norms pertaining to specific behaviors can be traced to general moral principles. Yet, the ambiguity in translating abstract moral principles into specific behavioral guidelines is where the action is. This is what causes disagreement between individuals or groups endorsing diverging interpretations of the same moral rule. This ambiguity also provides the leeway for people to redeem their moral self after moral transgressions by selectively choosing which specific behaviors are diagnostic for their broader moral intentions and which are not.

Furthermore, the emotional burden of moral experiences and the impact this has on subsequent moral reasoning and moral judgments are strongly emphasized in different perspectives that are seen as influential in this literature (e.g., Blasi, 1980 ; Haidt, 2001 ). Notably, the emotions that are seen as distinctive for human morality (shame and guilt) refer to explicitly self-reflective states. The experience of these particular emotions helps people to identify the moral implications of their judgments and behaviors, and the anticipation of these emotions supports efforts to regulate their behavior accordingly. Here too there is a disjoint between what theoretical perspectives emphasize and what empirical studies examine. That is, across the board, moral emotions constitute the least frequently examined research theme. Furthermore, even the studies that do address moral emotions do not always tap into these uniquely human and self-reflective moral emotions. Instead, there seems to be a preference for research paradigms that focus on the emergence of disgust. While this allows researchers to use implicit measures to assess physical or symbolic distancing of the self from aversive situations, other studies have noted that the stimuli examined in this way may not necessarily have moral overtones. As a result, the added value of such work for understanding the emotional implications of moral situations or charting the role of emotions in the regulation of one’s own moral behavior is limited.

Highly influential approaches that are very frequently cited in the studies reviewed (most notably, Blasi, 1980 ; Haidt, 2001 ) emphasize the importance of connecting “thoughts” and cognitions to “experiences” and actions. Yet, we conclude that the clusters of research that emerge are located in a space where these emerge as opposite extremes. Most studies either address general principles, overall guidelines, or abstract preferences in rule endorsement or focus on concrete experiences and actions, without connecting the two. Furthermore, the role of moral emotions in relation to moral judgments, moral reasoning, moral behaviors, and moral self-views remains underexamined in this literature.

Reliance on Self-Reports Versus Observation of Self-Justifying Tendencies

A fourth conclusion emerging from our review resonates with concerns expressed by Augusto Blasi, more than 35 years ago. That is, he noted that researchers examining moral cognition (including information, norms, attitudes, values, reasoning, and judgments) ultimately aim to understand the role that different elements play in creating moral action. At the same time, he concluded that the designs and measures used in the 71 studies he reviewed actually did not allow researchers to substantially advance their understanding of the issues they aimed to examine and accused them of “intellectual laziness” (p. 9) in failing to provide a clearly articulated theoretical rationale for relations examined.

In our review examining more than 1,000 empirical studies that were published since, we still see similar concerns emerging. In fact, there is a marked reliance on self-reports, explicit judgments or choices, and self-stated behavioral intentions, and we found very few examples of studies using implicit indicators of moral concerns or (psycho)physiological measures. This is unfortunate, in view of the far-reaching social implications of moral choices and moral behaviors, causing self-presentational concerns and defensive responses to guide the deliberate responses of research participants (see also Ellemers, 2017 ).

Furthermore, the empirical measures generally used largely rely on self-reports of general dispositions or overall preferences and intentions. This does not reflect current theoretical insights on the prevalence of defensive and self-justifying mechanisms in the way people think about the moral behaviors of themselves and others. It is also not in line with the results of empirical studies reviewed here, documenting how strategic self-presentation, biased judgments, and other self-defensive responses can be raised by various types of situational features that may be incidental and unrelated to the moral issue at hand. In light of the empirical evidence demonstrating various types of bias in each of the research themes examined, it is difficult to understand why so many researchers still rely on measures that capture individual differences or general tendencies and assume these have predictive value across situations.

Even though studies documenting factors that may induce biased judgments call into question the predictive value of standardized measures of morality, we do think it is theoretically meaningful to establish these situational variations. The crucial implication of these findings is that seemingly unimportant or irrelevant situational features can have far-reaching implications for real-life moral decisions. This knowledge can be used to redesign relevant conditions, for instance, at work, to support employees who feel they need to blow the whistle ( Keenan, 1995 ) or to help sales persons decide how to deal with customer interests ( Kurland, 1995 ).

Recent Developments and Where to Go From Here

We devote this final section of our review to promising avenues that researchers have started to pursue, which offer concrete examples of how to connect different strands of research and examine additional levels of analysis that may inspire future researchers. Even though we have criticized the lack of integration between the different research themes examined, some of the seminal studies in our review stand out in that they are also frequently cited in another theme than where they were classified. This is the case for the seminal study by Graham et al. (2009) on moral reasoning, the work of Bandura et al. (1996) on moral disengagement, and the work by Leach et al. (2007) on the importance of morality for group identities. This attests to the fact that at least some of the studies reviewed here have successfully connected different themes in research on morality.

This tendency seems to be followed up in some recent studies we found. For instance, several researchers have begun to investigate how general principles in moral reasoning relate to concrete behaviors in specific situations. These include studies revealing relations between the endorsement of abstract moral principles to donations people make to different causes (migrants, medical research, international aid; Nilsson, Erlandsson, Vastfjall, 2016 ). Similarly, endorsement of general moral principles or values has been related to specific behaviors in experimental games (trust game, thieves game; Clark, Swails, Pontinen, Boverman, Kriz, & Hendricks, 2017 ; Kistler, Thöni, & Welzel, 2017 ). This has yielded more insight into how abstract principles relate to specific behaviors and has demonstrated which principles are relevant in which situations. For instance, actions requiring the exercise of self-control were found to relate to “binding” moral foundations in particular ( Mooijman, Meindl, et al., 2018 ).

Another promising avenue for future research is charted by researchers who have begun to address the role of emotions in guiding other responses relating to morality. This includes work demonstrating how individual differences in emotion regulation affect moral reasoning ( Zhang, Kong, & Li, 2017 ). Furthermore, it has been shown that interventions that alter emotional responses can affect moral behaviors (e.g., Jackson, Gaertner, & Batson, 2016 ; see also Yip & Schweitzer, 2016 ). Others have shown that understanding the experience of guilt and shame in response to harm done to others helps predict subsequent self-forgiving and self-punishing responses ( Griffin, Moloney, Green, et al., 2016 ).

The overreliance on intrapersonal and interpersonal mechanisms in the study of morality has been noted before (see also Ellemers, 2017 ; Ellemers, Pagliaro, & Barreto, 2013 ). Recent research has begun to document a number of intragroup mechanisms that are relevant to increase our understanding of moral behavior. This includes work showing the reluctance of groups to include individuals in particular when their morality is called into question ( Van der Lee, Ellemers, Scheepers, & Rutjens, 2017 ). Recent studies also document the ways in which shared social identities and group-specific moral norms may affect moral reasoning ( Gao, Chen, & Li, 2016 ), affect moral behaviors, and overrule individual convictions as people seek to receive respect from other ingroup members ( Bizumic, Kenny, Iyer, Tanuwira, & Huxey, 2017 ; Mooijman, Hoover, Lin, Ji, & Dehghani, 2018 ).

Depending on the nature of the group and the moral norms these endorse, this can have positive as well as negative implications ( Pulfrey & Butera, 2016 ; Renger, Mommert, Renger, & Simon, 2016 ; Stoeber & Hotham, 2016 ; Stoeber & Yang, 2016 ). The relevance and everyday implications of these phenomena are also documented in studies examining the emergence of moral conformity on social media ( Kelly, Ngo, Chituc, Huettel, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2017 ) or the way international experiences and exposure to multiple moral norms in different foreign countries can elicit moral relativism ( Lu, Quoidbach, Gino, Chakroff, Maddux, & Galinsky, 2017 ).

Furthermore, the overreliance on U.S. samples and political ideologies is now beginning to be complemented by studies examining how moral concerns may be similar or different in different cultural and political contexts (e.g., Nilson, & Strupp-Levitsky, 2016 ). Recent work has compared the moral foundations endorsed by Chinese versus U.S. samples ( Kwan, 2016 ), has examined this among Muslims in Turkey (Yilmaz, Harma, & Bakçekapili, & Cesur, 2016), and has made other intercultural comparisons ( Stankov & Lee, 2016a , 2016b ; Sullivan, Stewart, Landau, Liu, Yang, & Diefendorf, 2016 ). This helps understand that some moral concerns emerge consistently across different cultural contexts, and the macro-level cultural values and corruption indicators that characterize them ( Mann, Garcia-Rada, Hornuf, Tafurt, & Ariely, 2016 ). However, it has also revealed that different political systems (in Finland, Kivikangas, Lönnquist, & Ravaja, 2017 ), cultural values (in India, Clark, Bauman, Kamble, & Knowles, 2017 ), or relations between social groups (in Lebanon and Morocco, Obeid, Argo, & Ginges, 2017 ) may raise different moral concerns and behaviors than are commonly observed in the United States (see also Haidt et al., 1993 ).

The Paradox of Morality

The increased interest of psychological researchers in issues relating to morality was prompted at least partly by societal developments during the past years. These have raised questions from the general public and made available research funds to address issues relating to civic conduct, ethical leadership, and moral behavior in various professional contexts ranging from finance and sports, to community care and science. Therefore, we think it is relevant to consider how the body of evidence that is currently available speaks to these issues.

A recurring theme in this literature, which also explains some of the difficulties encountered by empirical researchers, relates to what we will refer to as the “paradox of morality.” That is, from all the research reviewed here, it is clear that most people have a strong desire to be moral and to appear moral in the eyes of (important) others. The paradox is that the sincere motivation to do what is considered “right” and the strong aversion to being considered morally deficient can make people untruthful and unreliable as they are reluctant to own up to moral lapses or attempt to compensate for them. Paradoxically too, those who care less about their moral identity may actually be more consistent in their behavior and more accurate in their self-reports as they are less bothered by appearing morally inadequate. As a result, all the research that reveals self-defensive responses when people are unable to live up to their own standards or those of others, or when they are reminded of their moral lapses, implies that there is limited value in relying on people’s self-stated moral principles or moral ideals to predict their real-life behaviors.

On an applied note, this paradox of morality also clarifies some of the difficulties of aiming for moral improvement by confronting people with their morally questionable behaviors. Such criticism undermines people’s moral self-views and likely raises guilt and shame. This in turn elicits self-defensive responses (justifications, victim blaming, moral disengagement) in particular among those who think of themselves as endorsing universal moral guidelines prescribing fairness and care. Furthermore, questioning people’s moral viewpoints easily raises moral outrage and aggression toward others who think differently. This is also visible in studies examining moral rebels and moral courage (those who stand up for their own principles) or moral entrepreneurship and moral exporting (those who actively seek to convince others of their own moral principles). While the behavior of such individuals would seem to deserve praise and admiration as exemplifying morality, it also involves going against other people’s convictions and challenging their values, which is not always welcomed by these others. All these responses stand in the way of behavioral improvement. Instead of focusing on people’s explicit moral choices to make them adapt their behavior, it may therefore be more effective to nudge them toward change by altering goal primes, situational features, or decision frames.

We have noted above that it would be misleading to think that morality can be captured as an individual difference that has predictive value across situations. Yet, this is the conclusion that is often implicitly drawn and also informs many of the attempts to monitor and guard moral behavior in practice. For instance, in many businesses, the standard response to integrity incidents or moral transgressions is to sanction or expel specific individuals and to make newcomers pass assessment tests and take pledges. The research reviewed here suggests that attempts to guard moral behavior, for instance at work, may be more effective when these also take into account contextual features, for instance, by critically assessing organizational norms, team climates, or leadership behaviors that have allowed for such behavior to emerge.

The overreliance on intrapersonal analyses and individual moral judgments easily masks that individual moral standards are defined in relation to group norms. Whether individuals are considered to do what is “good” or “bad” depends on how their moral standards relate to what the group deems (in)appropriate. Indeed, we have seen that what is considered “immoral” behavior by some might be seen as morally adequate or even desirable by others. For instance, collective interests and limits to the circle of care may lead individuals to show loyalty to the moral guidelines of their own group while placing others outside their circle of care. Bolstering people’s sense of community and common identity or appealing to their altruism and empathy may therefore not necessarily resolve moral issues. Instead, this may just as well increase biased decision making or intensify intergroup conflicts on what is morally acceptable behavior. The current emphasis of many studies on individual differences and the focus on finding out how to suppress selfishness or how to avoid cheating may mask such group-level concerns.

During the past years, many researchers have examined questions relating to the psychology of morality. Our main conclusion from the studies reviewed here is that these have yielded insights that are unbalanced, neglect some key features of human morality specified in influential theoretical perspectives, and are not well integrated. The current challenge for theory development and research in morality therefore is to consider the complexity and multifaceted nature of the psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior and to connect different mechanisms—instead of studying them in isolation.

Supplemental Material

Author Contributions: The division of tasks and responsibilities between the authors was as follows: N.E. designed the study; developed the coding scheme; coded and interpreted studies published from 2000 through 2017; supervised the further data collection, analyses, and preparation of tables and figures; and prepared text for the introduction, method, results, and discussion. J.V.d.T. designed the study, helped develop the stcoding scheme and coded studies published from 2000 through 2017, and revised text for the introduction, method, results, and discussion. Y.P. collected and interpreted studies published from 2000 through 2013 and prepared the database emerging from the first wave of data collection for further coding and analysis. T.v.L. conducted the bibliometric analyses, prepared figures and statistics reporting these analyses, and prepared text describing the method and results of the bibliometric analyses.

Authors’ Note: This research was made possible by a Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) SPINOZA grant and a National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) Fellowship grant awarded to the first author and an NWO RUBICON grant awarded to the second author. We thank Jamie Breukel, Nadia Buiter, Kai van Eekelen, Piet Groot, Miriam Hoffmann-Harnisch, Martine Kloet, Jeanette van der Lee, Marleen van Stokkum, Esmee Veenstra, Melissa Vink, and Erik van Wijk for their assistance in completing the database and preparing materials for the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental Material: Supplemental material is available online with this article.