Hegelians Axel Honneth and Robert Williams on the Development of Human Morality

An individual is in the lowest phase of moral development if he thinks only of his own personal interest and has only his own selfish agenda in his mind as he encounters other humans. This lowest phase corresponds well with sixteenth century British moral egoism which reflects the rise of the new economic order. Adam Smith (1723?C1790) wanted to defend this new economic order which is based on economic exchange between egoistic individuals. Nevertheless, he surely did not want to support the moral theory of British egoism. His book The Wealth of Nations suits well into the world view of British moral egoism, but in the book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he presents a moral theory which is the total opposite of moral egoism. Contemporary German intellectuals saw contradiction in Adam Smith??s moral (social) philosophy which they called as Das Adam-Smith-Problem. Smith himself didn??t think that there is any contradiction in a situation where in economic sphere (civil society) individual act egoistically and in ethical sphere (encounter with the imagined Other) he feels humanity and compassion toward his fellow men. Hegel was a passionate reader of Adam Smith and he acknowledged Das Adam-Smith-Problem. He set the task of his social philosophy to overcome this paradox. He wanted to create a theory of a social totality where economic egoism and feelings of humanity are not in contradiction. In the same time Hegel wanted to create a theory on Bildung process where human spirit develops from moral un-freedom (heteronomy) to moral freedom and maturity (autonomy) taking care both aspect of love and reason. In certain Hegel??s texts notion of recognition plays crucial role. That is why modern Hegelians Ludwig Siep, Axel Honneth and Robert Williams consider the notion of recognition to be elementary in Hegel??s threefold theory of developing human spirit from family via civil society to sittliche state. For Hegel family is a sphere where people love their ??concrete other?? and where feeling surpasses reason. Civil Society is a sphere of private contracts and economic exchanges where cold egoistic and calculative reason surpasses feelings. In the sphere of State the contradiction between family and Civil Society (Das Adam-Smith-Problem) is solved by ??rational feeling??. According to Hegel State should protect citizens from alienating effect of egoistic reason of Civil Society and cultivate ??family-feelings?? to rational feelings which integrate citizen into ??sittliche community?? through reciprocal process of recognition. In this article I want to consider Hegelians Honneth??s and Williams??s relevance to the theory of moral development.     

Moral expertise

We offer a theory of moral expertise based on an updated version of the Thomistic concept of habitus. We maintain that mature moral control arises from internalized standards of belief married to corresponding actions; the result is moral expertise. Beliefs and actions (conceptualized as habitus) coalesce in a moral identity, which is then sustained by the beliefs and actions that comprise the habitus; what we do affects who we are and what we believe, just as what we believe guides what we do. In support of these claims, we examine recent research on moral judgment, moral identity, and moral emotions.     

Moral identity and education in a multicultural society

In answering the question, “Which moral identity has to be developed in a multicultural society?” we draw a distinction between public and non-public identities of persons. On our view, a liberal democracy is characterized by a specific conception of these two central components of moral identity. In section 2, we concentrate on the public identity, while, in section 3, the nonpublic identity is the centre of interest. In explaining these main components of moral identity, we will appeal to those aspects of identity as set out by Rorty &; Wong which are constitutive of moral identity.     

Is Consequential Luck Morally Inconsequential? Empirical Psychology and the Reassessment of Moral Luck

Philosophical discussions of the phenomenon that has come to be known as ‘moral luck’ have either dismissed it as illusory or touted it as the evidence for doubting the probative value of our commitment to certain widely avowed views concerning interpersonal assessments of responsibility. In this discussion, we present a third, distinctive interpretation of the moral luck phenomenon. Drawing upon empirically robust results from psychological studies of judgment bias, we argue that the phenomenon of moral luck is demonstrably not illusory. What we suggest, however, is that the phenomenon ought not to be taken to countenance doubts about the standards generally taken to be regulative of assessments of interpersonal responsibility. Rather, its significance lies in foregrounding certain generally unacknowledged obstacles we face in the process of conclusively applying general valid moral standards in making specific judgments of responsibility and desert.¹     

One Thought Too Few: Where <Emphasis Type="Italic">De Dicto</Emphasis> Moral Motivation is Necessary

De dicto moral motivation is typically characterized by the agent’s conceiving of her goal in thin normative terms such as to do what is right. I argue that lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation (at least in a certain broad sense of this term) would put the agent in a bad position for responding in the morally-best manner (relative to her epistemic state) in a certain type of situations. Two central features of the relevant type of situations are (1) the appropriateness of the agent’s uncertainty concerning her underived moral values, and (2) the practical, moral importance of resolving this uncertainty. I argue that in some situations that are marked by these two features the most virtuous response is deciding to conduct a deep moral inquiry for a de dicto moral purpose. In such situations lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation would amount to a moral shortcoming. I show the implications for Michael Smith’s (1994) argument against Motivational Judgment Externalism and for Brian Weatherson’s (2014) argument against avoiding moral recklessness: both arguments rely on a depreciating view of de dicto moral motivation, and both fail; or so I argue.     

Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues

In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction.     

Distinct neuronal patterns of positive and negative moral processing in psychopathy

Psychopathy is a disorder characterized by severe and frequent moral violations in multiple domains of life. Numerous studies have shown psychopathy-related limbic brain abnormalities during moral processing; however, these studies only examined negatively valenced moral stimuli. Here, we aimed to replicate prior psychopathy research on negative moral judgments and to extend this work by examining psychopathy-related abnormalities in the processing of controversial moral stimuli and positive moral processing. Incarcerated adult males (N = 245) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging protocol on a mobile imaging system stationed at the prison. Psychopathy was assessed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Participants were then shown words describing three types of moral stimuli: wrong (e.g., stealing), not wrong (e.g., charity), and controversial (e.g., euthanasia). Participants rated each stimulus as either wrong or not wrong. PCL-R total scores were correlated with not wrong behavioral responses to wrong moral stimuli, and were inversely related to hemodynamic activity in the anterior cingulate cortex in the contrast of wrong > not wrong. In the controversial > noncontroversial comparison, psychopathy was inversely associated with activity in the temporal parietal junction and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results indicate that psychopathy-related abnormalities are observed during the processing of complex, negative, and positive moral stimuli.     

Perceived motivational climate in male youth soccer: relations to social–moral functioning,sportspersonship and team norm perceptions

Aim: To investigate the relationship between the perceived motivational climate, sportspersonship, social–moral functioning and team norms in a sample of young male Norwegian soccer players.Hypotheses: It was expected that a performance-oriented motivational climate would be associated with lower levels of social–moral functioning, sportspersonship and the perceptions of team norms that would approve of illegitimate behaviours in soccer. By contrast, a mastery-oriented climate was hypothesised to be beneficial with respect to social–moral functioning, sporstspersonship and morally constructive team norm perceptions.Method: A cross-sectional study of 279 male soccer players (aged 12–14 years) taking part in the international youth soccer tournament, The Norway Cup, was conducted in which players responded to a questionnaire measuring different dimensions of social–moral functioning, including moral judgements, priority for more mature social–moral motives or reasons faced with moral dilemmas, amoral and sportspersonship behaviours and team norm perceptions.Results: Canonical correlation analysis coupled with multivariate analysis of variance showed that players who perceived the motivational climate as predominantly mastery oriented reported more mature levels of social–moral reasoning and better sportspersonhip behaviours. These players were also less apt to report amoral behaviour and perceive team norms as strongly disapproving of pro-aggressiveness. In contrast, players perceiving the motivational climate as predominantly performance-oriented were more apt to report amoral behaviours in soccer and were less likely to express sportspersonship behaviour.Conclusions: The findings illustrate the importance of studying motivational conditions in order to provide an understanding of social–moral functioning, sportspersonship and social–moral team norms in youth soccer.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

Medical ethics in France: The latest great political debate

The American term Bioethics has been adopted over the last ten years and the development of Bioethics committees on the American model testifies this influence, even before the official appointment of a National Committee in 1983. This phenomenon acknowledged as the “emergence of French bioethics” is in fact the final outcome of a long-lasting crisis in the medical profession, in quest for a new style of ethics, breaking with the traditional professional ethics (French Déontologie, through the Ordre des Médecins). Among other factors of conceptual and institutional change, the increase of biomedical research comes first: a major consequence is the sharing of moral responsibilities in decision-making with outsider scientists and finally the involvement of the whole population as potential moral subjects. The designation of these events as the emergence of French bioethics is hardly appropriate for an account of this dramatic shift in ethical norms and roles in medicine. This paper attempts to review the intellectual roots of the recent evolution and to summarize present and prospective trends.     

The notion of the moral: the relation between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology

In this paper I argue that virtue ethics should be understood as a form of ethics which integrates various domains of the practical in relation to which virtues are excellences. To argue this it is necessary to distinguish two senses of the “moral”: the broad sense which integrates the domains of the practical and a narrow classificatory sense. Virtue ethics, understood as above, believes that all genuine virtue should be understood as what I call virtues proper. To possess a virtue proper (such as an excellent disposition of open-mindedness, an epistemic virtue) is to possess a disposition of overall excellence in relation to the sphere or field of the virtue (being open to the opinions of others). Overall excellence in turn involves excellence in integrating to a sufficient degree, standards of excellence in all relevant practical domains. Epistemic virtues, sporting virtues, moral virtues, and so on are all virtues proper. In particular it is impossible for an epistemic virtue to be a moral (narrow sense) vice.     

A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism

If what is morally right or wrong were ultimately a function of our opinions, then even such reprehensible actions as genocide and slavery would be morally right, had we approved of them. Many moral philosophers find this conclusion objectionably permissive, and to avoid it they posit a moral reality that exists independently of what anyone thinks. The notion of an independent moral reality has been subjected to meticulous metaphysical, epistemological and semantic criticism, but it is hardly ever examined from a moral point of view. In this essay I offer such a critique. I argue that the appeal to an independent moral reality as a ground for moral obligations constitutes a substantive moral mistake. However, I do not conclude from this that we must therefore embrace the opposite view that moral truths are ultimately dependent on our attitudes. Rather, I suggest that we reject both of these views and answer the classic meta-ethical question “Is what we morally ought to do ultimately a function of our actual attitudes, or determined independently of them?” with Neither.     

In the World of Persons: The Personhood Debate in the Analects and Zhuangzi

This article is an examination of a debate between Confucians and Zhuangists surrounding the notion of moral personhood as understood in the early Confucian tradition. This debate takes place across texts??most importantly in the Confucian challenge of Analects 18.5-7 and the Zhuangist response of the Renjianshi chapter of the Zhuangzi. In better understanding the disagreement between these two schools, we can come to a clearer picture of the notion of personhood at stake. The Zhuangist reaction to the Confucian position on personhood helps to demonstrate that the Confucians held a conception of the person as communally constructed. Such a view, I argue, can be of great use in contemporary debates surrounding agency, moral responsibility, and moral development. After offering an outline of the Confucian position, I consider various Zhuangist objections both in the Analects and Renjianshi chapter, before considering what I take to be convincing Confucian responses to the Zhuangist objections.     

Natural,Artifactual, and Moral Goodness

In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot (2001) aims to provide an account of moral evaluation that is both naturalistic and cognitivist. She argues that moral evaluation is a variety of natural evaluation in the sense that moral judgments of human action and character have the same “grammar” or “conceptual structure” as natural judgments of the goodness (e.g., health) of plants and animals. We argue that Foot’s naturalist project can succeed, but not in the way she envisions, because her central thesis that moral evaluation is a variety of natural evaluation is not entirely correct. We show that both moral and natural evaluation are species of kind evaluation, which encompasses moral, natural, and artifact evaluation. Kind evaluation is a form of evaluation, according to which things are evaluated qua members of a kind, in such a way that the kind into which something is classified informs the standards of evaluation (or norms) for things of that kind. Because the source of the normative standards for moral evaluation is different from the source of the normative standards for natural evaluation, moral evaluation is not a species of natural evaluation. However, both are varieties of kind evaluation. This account of moral evaluation as a variety of kind evaluation is still an effective response to non-naturalism and to non-cognitivism.     

De dicto desires and morality as fetish

It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto. If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling. I resolve the puzzle by showing that on a proper understanding of the interaction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, it is not only not fetishistic, but quite possibly desirable, to be motivated by a de dicto desire to do the right thing. My argument relies partly on an appeal to a non-buck-passing account of moral rightness, according to which rightness is itself an additional reason-giving property over and above the right-making properties of an action. If this account of moral rightness is correct, then we would expect the morally best agents to exhibit de dicto moral motivation. However, since their de dicto desire acts in concert with de re desires, there is no reason to consider it a fetish.     

Moral Machines?

Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen??s Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2009) explores efforts to develop machines that, not only can be employed for good or bad ends, but which themselves can be held morally accountable for what they do??artificial moral agents (AMAs). This essay is a critical response to Wallach and Allen??s conjectures. Although Wallach and Allen do not suggest that we are close to being able to create full-fledged AMAs, they do talk seriously about making incremental progress in the direction of creating them (even if we never fully succeed). However, there are important questions about the moral development of AMAs that Moral Machines does not address. Given the responsibilities entrusted to human moral agents, we take questions about their moral development very seriously. In the case of children, the hope is that eventually they will develop into full-fledged moral agents. How might we expect this to go with less than fully formed AMAs? Will there be a comparable story of moral development and moral education that we can tell?     

The moral disengagement in doping scale

Statement of problemThe use of banned substances to enhance performance occurs in sport. Therefore, developing valid and reliable instruments that can predict likelihood to use banned substances is important.MethodWe conducted three studies. In Study 1, football players (N = 506) and athletes from a variety of team sports (N = 398) completed the Moral Disengagement in Doping Scale (MDDS). In Study 2, team sport athletes (N = 232) completed the MDDS and questionnaires measuring moral disengagement in sport, doping attitudes, moral identity, antisocial sport behavior, situational doping temptation, and task and ego goal orientations. A week later, a subsample (n = 102) completed the MDDS and indicated their likelihood to use a banned substance in a hypothetical situation. In Study 3, athletes (N = 201) from a variety of individual sports completed the MDDS and indicated their likelihood to use a banned substance in a hypothetical situation.ResultsThe results of Study 1 showed that a one-factor model fitted the data well, and the scale had measurement invariance across males and females. In Study 2, we provided evidence for convergent, concurrent, discriminant, and predictive validity, as well as test-rest reliability, of the scale. In Study 3, doping moral disengagement was positively related with reported likelihood and temptation to use a banned substance. The scale exhibited very good internal consistency across the three studies.ConclusionsIn conclusion, the MDDS can be used to measure moral disengagement in doping in team and individual sports.     

Smith’s practicality requirement meets dual-process models of moral judgment

In The Moral Problem, Michael Smith argues that only motivational internalists can offer an adequate explanation of why changes in moral judgment tend to be accompanied by changes in motivation in morally virtuous people. Smith argues that the failure of motivational externalism to account for this phenomenon amounts to a reductio of the view. In this paper, I draw on dual-process models of moral judgment to develop an externalist response to Smith’s argument. The key to my proposal is that motivationally efficacious states are often the source of our moral judgments, and changes in judgment are typically the result of changes in these states. However, moral judgments can also be formed via an alternative pathway that does not necessarily affect motivation, and so motivation and judgment can come apart. This response not only defuses Smith’s objections to externalism, but challenges Smith to square his internalist proposal with the empirical details of moral judgment.     

When Values and Behavior Conflict: Moral Pluralism and Intrapersonal Moral Hypocrisy

The authors review the various ways moral hypocrisy has been defined and operationalized by social psychologists, concentrating on three general types: moral duplicity, moral double standards, and moral weakness. While most approaches have treated moral hypocrisy as an interpersonal phenomenon, requiring public claims, preaching (versus practicing), or judgments of others (versus oneself), this paper also considers intrapersonal moral hypocrisy – that is, conflicts between values and behavior that may exist even in the absence of public pronouncements or judgments. Current attempts to understand and combat intrapersonal moral hypocrisy are aided by moral pluralism, the idea that there are many different moral values, which may come into conflict both between and within individuals. Examples are given to illustrate how taking into account individual differences in values can help to reduce moral hypocrisy. The authors close by considering the possibility that in a pluralistic world, reducing intrapersonal moral hypocrisy might not always be a normatively desired end goal.     

Moral masquerades: Experimental exploration of the nature of moral motivation

Why do people act morally – when they do? Moral philosophers and psychologists often assume that acting morally in the absence of incentives or sanctions is a product of a desire to uphold one or another moral principle (e.g., fairness). This form of motivation might be called moral integrity because the goal is to actually be moral. In a series of experiments designed to explore the nature of moral motivation, colleagues and I have found little evidence of moral integrity. We have found considerable evidence of a different form of moral motivation, moral hypocrisy. The goal of moral hypocrisy is to appear moral yet, if possible, avoid the cost of being moral. To fully reach the goal of moral hypocrisy requires self-deception, and we have found evidence of that as well. Strengthening moral integrity is difficult. Even effects of moral perspective taking – imagining yourself in the place of the other (as recommended by the Golden Rule) – appear limited, further contributing to the moral masquerade.