Thomas E. Wren

The moral self

This follow-up to The Moral Domain carries forward the exploration of new ways of modeling moral behavior. Whereas the first volume emphasized the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and the tradition of cognitive development, The Moral Self presents a paradigm that also incorporates noncognitive structures of selfhood. The concerns of the sixteen essays include the diversity of moral outlooks, the dynamics of creating a moral self, cognitive and noncognitive prerequisites of the psychological-development of autonomy and moral competence, and motivation and moral personality. Gil G. Noam is Director of the Hall-Mercer Laboratory of Developmental Psychology and Developmental Psychopathology at Harvard Medical School. Thomas Wren is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago.Contributors: Part I. Conceptual Foundations. Harry Frankfurt. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Ernst Tugendhat. Ernest S. Wolf. Thomas Wren. Part II. Building a New Paradigm. Augusto Blasi. Anne Colby and William Damon. Helen Haste. Mordecai Nisan. Gil G. Noam. Larry Nucci and John Lee. Part III. Empirical Investigation. Monika. Keller and Wolfgang Edelstein. Lothar Krappmann. Leo Montada. Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. Ervin Staub.

Cultural Identity and Personal Identity

This chapter discusses the relationship between personal identity and what is variously called group identity, reference group orientation, and — in the broadest sense of the term — cultural identity, with a special interest paid to how the contrast between these two sorts of identity operates in the discourse of modern social science. The orthodox discourse of social scientists, especially that of personality theorists, treats personal identity as an epiphenomenon of group identity and as an amalgam of self-concept and self-esteem. This conceptual construction has grown out of a more general discussion in the mid-20th century social theory concerning how individuals are related to groups, and is represented by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s and, more recently, by contemporary racial identity theorists.

“Why be Moral?” a Philosophical Taxonomy of Moral Motivation

In the following pages I will try to clarify the concept of moral motivation by laying out a “philosophical taxonomy” of the concept that takes into account the classical and contemporary literature of philosophical ethics as well as psychological accounts of human motivation and moral judgment.

Book ReviewsMartin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 331.

In 1970 Martin Hoffman published a 100-page state-of-the-art article on moral development that laid out the logical geography of the field, identified its three major schools of thought, and raised important questions about moral socialization and other topics related to the linkage between judgment and action. Now, three decades later, he answers many of these questions in Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. As its title indicates, the unifying concept of Hoffman’s moral psychology is empathy, which he defines as “the vicarious affective response to another person” (p. 29). From this deceptively simple definition—which he contrasts with the more cognitive definition of empathy as the awareness of another person’s internal states, proposed by William Ickes in the latter’s Empathic Accuracy (New York: Guilford, 1997)—Hoffman develops a surprisingly complex and comprehensive account of how children become moral agents and, indeed, moral philosophers. A certain amount of “empathic accuracy” is built into Hoffman’s own theory, but he drops the requirement of an affective match between observer and model in favor of the definitional criterion that an empathic response is “the involvement of psychological processes that make a person have feelings that are more congruent with another’s situation than with his own situation” (p. 30; my italics). In other words, you are empathic not because you have the very same feelings that someone else is having but rather because you have feelings that are appropriate to what is happening to the other person. Thus anger would be an appropriate feeling if you saw a woman being attacked even though the victim herself might be feeling not anger but some other emotion, such as fear or disappointment. With this point of departure Hoffman takes as his paradigm case the phenomenon of empathic distress, though of course empathy could also take the form of joy or delight in another’s good fortune. Empathic distress (unlike empathic joy) is the prosocial motive par excellence, not only because of evidence that it correlates positively with helping behavior but also because it precedes and contributes to that behavior. Furthermore, the extensive research that Hoffman and other social, developmental, and experimental psychologists have carried out over the last four decades indicates that empathic distress diminishes in intensity when one helps another—in short, one feels better. Much of this has already been said, if not by Hoffman then by the many other behavioral and social scientists who have studied what is referred to generically as altruism. Consequently, without gainsaying his contribution to that literature or devaluing the importance of his decision to focus on the process of empathic response rather than its outcomes—the feeling states as such—I

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Although I think most of what Michael Slote asserts in his article ‘Sentimentalist moral education’ is correct, I worry about three important ideas that are conspicuous by their absence. The first is the possibility that human emotions and feelings are inherently cognitive, which is never considered in his psychological account of empathy. The second is that his metaethical claim that ‘our very understanding of moral terms and moral principles rests on a foundation of empathy’ fails to recognize the culture-specific character of the very concept of morality. My third misgiving is that Slote overstates the now-standard distinction between the ethics of care and the ethics of principles, which I argue is a matter of emphasis, not opposition, especially in the context of moral education.

Michael Slote and ‘Sentimentalist moral education’

Philosophers often try to define the limits of thought beyond which nothing further can be said. This aim is odd, for in seeking a clearer and more systematic view of our relation to the world, philosophical reflection itself appears to have no natural end. As his title suggests, Thomas Nagel shares something of this puzzling ambition to have in philosophy ‘‘the last word.’’ He, too, thinks it essential that we determine ‘‘where understanding and justification come to an end.’’ Do we seek their limits in ‘‘objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view’’? Or do we look for them ‘‘within our point of view—individual or shared— so that ultimately, even the apparently most objective and universal principles derive their validity or authority from the perspective and practice of those who follow them’’ (p. 3)? Nagel holds to the first approach. Like Plato, Descartes, and Frege, he sees reason as a form of thought in which, distancing ourselves from received practices, we draw upon a source of authority that is not merely personal or social, but universal. His book is directed against the opposite view that the limits of thought are perspectival. Subjectivism, he believes, is rampant in our culture, in ‘‘the lower reaches of the humanities and the social sciences’’ as well as among ingenious philosophers (notably Richard Rorty). I share Nagel’s alarm at the unthinking ease with which so many people dismiss the idea of objective validity. But his defense of reason wrongly cuts short philosophical reflection in several ways. Nagel’s primary argument against subjectivism is that it must fail to keep to the terms it sets. The subjectivist insists on adding some qualification to the principles on which our judgments rely. Their validity is said to depend on us, to express simply our ‘‘solidarity’’ with some community of belief or to consist in their being ‘‘acceptable to us under idealized conditions.’’ These views, Nagel objects, run contrary to what we mean when claiming that certain principles are valid, for our point is that the principles hold independently of us and serve to explain why some community is worth identifying with or why some conditions are ideal. This difficulty reflects, moreover, the fundamental incoherence in all such redefinitions of validity. In describing the point of view to which claims of validity are to be relativized, the subjectivist cannot avoid the unqualified language he officially spurns. We cannot regard ourselves as belonging to a community of inquiry or envisage occupying ideal conditions, except by locating these supposedly authoritative perspectives within a world we conceive straight. Such is the central thesis of Nagel’s book. Our thinking, he insists, necessarily takes place with an eye to there being a way things are that is independent of perspective. ‘‘The outermost framework of all thought must be a conception of what is objectively the case—what is the case without subjective or relative qualification’’ (p. 16). In seeking to bring our thinking within this impersonal framework, we are exercising reason, and the principles we thus employ have to be understood as being valid, not merely ‘‘for us,’’ but unqualifiedly. How far does

Book ReviewsMichele M Moody‐Adams, .Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. 260.

People change in many ways. Most changes come about smoothly and gradually, some are abrupt and vehement. In either case the result may be far reaching, as when the change leads to a fundamentally new way of seeing things. Sometimes we are aware of this, albeit perhaps only in retrospect: “Now I look at these things in a completely different way ...” In this book we are particularly interested in such forms of conceptual development by which certain aspects of reality come to be seen from a radically different perspective.

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Abstract The elaboration of Harres “ethogenic approach” in his various works is discussed. This approach hinges on the notion of rationality as expressive self-display in the context of discourse, and entails the primacy of the social over the individual order and the moral sciences over psychology. Harres critique of individual psychology, particularly that of the cognitive developmental tradition, is examined critically.

Philosophy of development: an invitation

Against Dantos recent argument that the causation internal to basic actions is not a special, immanent causation, it is objected that (i) he introduces a notion of truncated action that involves a fallacious use of the Equals‐subtracted‐from‐equals axiom, (ii) his version of the Identity Thesis turns upon a misleading notion of co‐referentiality, and (iii) he falls into what, by his own theory of meaning, amounts to a category mistake concerning intentions as causes within actions. Hence Dantos arguments do not warrant his materialist claim that causation is a univocal concept.