The Difficulty of Understanding Complexity and Simplicity in Moral Psychological Description

Camilla Kronqvist () and Natan Elgabsi ()
Additional contact information
Camilla Kronqvist: Ã…bo Akademi University, Philosophy, Finland
Natan Elgabsi: Ã…bo Akademi University, Philosophy, Finland

Scientia Moralitas Journal, 2021, vol. 6, issue 2, 78-103

Abstract: The social intuitionist approach to moral judgments advanced by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presupposes that it is possible to provide an explanation of the human moral sense without normative implications. By contrast, Iris Murdoch’s philosophical work on moral psychology suggests that every description of morality necessarily involves evaluative features that reveal the thinker’s own moral attitudes and implicit philosophical pictures. In the light of this, we contend that Haidt’s treatment of the story about Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, protected, and in his view harmless sex, provides a too simplistic picture of what is involved in understanding human morality. Despite his aim to explain the roots of moral judgments, he fails to provide a deeper understanding of morality in two different respects. First, he does so by suggesting that his story contains all the relevant information needed to take a moral stand on it, and by rejecting as irrelevant the wider human context in which questions about sexual and family relations arise. Second, he simplifies the responses of the people who are subject to his experiment by disregarding their various reasons for disapproving and by equating understanding human morality with explaining an impersonal psychological process.

Keywords: understanding; moral psychology; moral description; Iris Murdoch; Jonathan Haidt (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.scientiamoralitas.com/index.php/sm/article/view/102 (application/pdf)
http://www.scientiamoralitas.com/index.php/sm/article/view/102/96 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:smo:journl:v:6:y:2021:i:2:p:78-103

Access Statistics for this article

Scientia Moralitas Journal is currently edited by Ioan-Gheorghe Rotaru

More articles in Scientia Moralitas Journal from Scientia Moralitas, Research Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eduard David ().