Psychology as a Moral Science. Perspectives on Normativity

BLURB: What does morality have to do with psychology in a value-neutral, postmodern world? According to a provocative new book, everything. Taking exception with current ideas in the mainstream (including cultural, evolutionary, and neuropsychology) as straying from the discipline’s ethical foundations, Psychology as a Moral Science argues that psychological phenomena are inherently moral, and that psychology, as prescriptive and interventive practice, reflects specific moral principles. The book cites normative moral standards, as far back as Aristotle, that give human thoughts, feelings, and actions meaning, and posits psychology as one of the critical methods of organizing normative values in society; at the same time it carefully notes the discipline’s history of being sidetracked by overemphasis on theoretical constructs and physical causes—what the author terms “the psychologizing of morality.” This synthesis of ideas brings an essential unity to what can sometimes appear as a fragmented area of inquiry at odds with itself. The book’s “interpretive-pragmatic approach”: • Revisits core psychological concepts as supporting normative value systems. • Traces how psychology has shaped society’s view of morality • Confronts the “naturalistic fallacy” in contemporary psychology. • Explains why moral science need not be separated from social science. • Addresses challenges and critiques to the author’s work from both formalist and relativist theories of morality. With its bold call to reason, Psychology as a Moral Science contains enough controversial ideas to spark great interest among researchers and scholars in psychology and the philosophy of science. from Ch 1: This book is about psychology’s grounding in morality – or, in other words, about the ethical foundations and implications of psychology. 1 It presents the argument that psychological phenomena are inherently moral phenomena, and that psychology, as an array of investigative and interventionist practices, is, and ought to be, a moral science. Throughout the book, I aim to present a unified view of psychology and morality, not as two disjointed fields that are accidentally brought together, but as deeply and inherently related in many different ways. Often, however, the relations between psychology and morality are not recognized by psychologists themselves and this, I argue, is detrimental to the discipline, but also to the society that is affected by the workings of psychology in many different ways. Part I begins with a number of critical investigations into how modern psychology has shaped and in some ways distorted our views of morality and ourselves, and part II advances more positive and prescriptive views about how properly to conceive of morality and its relation to psychology. What this book aims to say can be summed up in two theses: the first is that psychological phenomena are normative, and the second is that not all normativity is conventional