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Scientific Study of Morals

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Book cover Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics

Abstract

The scientific study of morals has been subject to a tremendous change throughout the past decades, eliciting various theoretical models, paradigms, and methodologies from disciplines as philosophy, social and developmental psychology, cognitive science, or anthropology. This chapter reviews some of the main approaches to study human moral judgment scientifically in their chronological order. The review will take off at the rational theories of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, who considered moral judgment to be based on a process of explicit cognitive reasoning [1, 2], and move right through to Elliot Turiel’s attempt to distinguish conventional from moral (cognitive) domains [3]. This chapter then pays attention to current approaches, which particularly emphasize on the role of emotions on moral judgment (Jonathan Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model and Joshua Greene’s Dual-Process Theory, see [4, 5]), and to the discussion on whether or not moral judgment is based on an innate moral grammar instead of being culturally shaped primarily (John Mikhail’s Moral Grammar Theory, [6]). Each approach is reviewed and evaluated by its respective research questions, theoretical model, and specific methodological paradigms. This chapter concludes with current directions in developmental psychology and with a brief discussion of the future of a genuinely interdisciplinary field of research that presumably will have to undergo further changes in attempt to integrate diverse approaches into one coherent and complex field of research – a field that hopefully will continue evoking novel and exceptional research in both psychology and philosophy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Developmental Psychology, Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Dr. Maria Gräfenhain

  2. Department of Cognitive Science and Decision Making, Georg-Elias-Müller Institute of Psychology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Alex Wiegmann

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  1. Dr. Maria Gräfenhain
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  2. Alex Wiegmann
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Correspondence to Maria Gräfenhain .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Peter Löscher-Stiftungslehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsethik, Technische Universität München, München, Germany

    Christoph Luetge

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Gräfenhain, M., Wiegmann, A. (2013). Scientific Study of Morals. In: Luetge, C. (eds) Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1494-6_81

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1494-6_81

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

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