Gregory R. Peterson

Maturity is explicit: Self-importance of traits in humanitarian moral identity

Development of humanitarian moral identity may correspond with the growing self-importance of moral traits. This study considered the extent to which moral traits become explicit in novice and expert humanitarian moral identity narratives. Eighty humanitarian caregivers from L’Arche communities were given self-understanding interview prompts to assess temporal (i.e., past, present, and future) and relational expectations. Humanitarian responses were compared to four paragraphs comprised of moral traits (i.e., just, brave, caring, and religious) using a computational knowledge representation model known as latent semantic analysis (Landauer, T., McNamara, D., Dennis, S., & Kintsch, W. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of latent semantic analysis (University of Colorado Institute of Cognitive Science). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum). Consistent with predictions, humanitarian experts displayed more explicitly self-important moral traits than novices on future and romantic partner expectations. Findings suggest that humanitarian development is associated with simulation related to future goal achievement and moral action modeled by close intimates.

The Rationality of Ultimate Concern: Moral Exemplars, Theological Ethics, and the Science of Moral Cognition

Abstract This paper argues that consideration of moral exemplars may provide a means for integrating insights across philosophical ethics, theological ethics, and the scientific study of moral cognition. Key to this endeavor is an understanding of the relation of cognition and emotion in ethical decision-making, a relation that is usually understood to be oppositional but which in proper circumstances may be understood to be quite the opposite. Indeed, a distinctive feature of moral exemplarity may consist in the ability to properly integrate the emotions into the moral life, and reference to and imitation of exemplars may involve a referencing and imitating of the emotions of the exemplar.

Being Conscious of Marc Bekoff: Thinking of Animal Self‐Consciousness

The preceding article by Marc Bekoff reveals much about our current understanding of animal self-consciousness and its implications. It also reveals how much more there is to be said and considered. This response briefly examines animal self-consciousness from scientific, moral, and theological perspectives. As Bekoff emphasizes, self-consciousness is not one thing but many. Consequently, our moral relationship to animals is not simply one based on a graded hierarchy of abilities. Furthermore, the complexity of animal self-awareness can serve as stimulus for thinking about issues of theodicy and soteriology in a broader sense.

Personality's Role in Moral Action

We enjoyed the News Focus story “Using the psychology of evil to do good” (G. Miller, 29 April, p. [530][1]) about Philip Zimbardos new Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) for promoting moral action. However, we feel compelled to correct some misleading impressions that could result from the story

The Evolution of Morality and Religion

[1] Everybody claims to be an expert on religion. At least, so it seems when the subject of religion comes up. If the individual is religious, then the task is to explain the truth of one’s religion and to explain the existence (and sometimes falsity) of others. If the individual is not religious (in the conventional sense of the term), then the individual will have an explanation as to why everyone else is religious, usually to the effect that most people are gullible, that religion relieves anxiety or some other psychological malady, or that religion began as an explanation of the unexplainable and is now, thanks to modern science, a vestige of the ancient world that will eventually wither away. [2] The game of explaining religion is played by scholars as well, and in modern times has seen contributions from a variety of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, to religious studies, respectively represented by such classic voices as E. B. Tylor, Emile Durkehim, Sigmund Freud, and James Frazer. Biology is a relative latecomer to this discourse, but since the publication of E. O Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975 and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene in 1976, there has been a steady stream of research and speculation as to the evolutionary origins of morality and religion and the link between the two. [3] DonaldBroom’sTheEvolutionofMoralityandReligion is a contribution to this field of literature, which has burgeoned within the last decade. Broom is Colleen Macleod Professor of Animal Welfare in the Department of Clinical VeterinaryMedicine at theUniversity of Cambridge. It is a distinctive and unusual vantage point fromwhich towrite about the evolution ofmorality and religion, one that is fraught with dangers since veterinary medicine provides no background in philosophy and religion and also puts him at some distance from the primary research in evolutionary biology. By itself, this is neither here nor there; many scholars are accomplished virtuosi who are able to cross disciplinary boundaries with ease. In Broom’s case, this is less so, and the result is a work that, while serviceable in some aspects, neither stands out in originality nor does justice to the complexity of the phenomena it examines. [4] Broom’s thesis, as the title implies, is straightforward: the origin and significance of religion and morality can be explained on evolutionary grounds. For Broom, this is both a descriptive and normative claim. Descriptively, Broom claims that evolutionary biology can give an account of how morality arises in biological organisms and what role religion plays in supporting morality. Nor-