Psychology and morality

an interpretive-pragmatic view

pp. 1-14

in: Svend Brinkmann, Psychology as a moral science, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

This book is about psychology's grounding in morality – or, in other words, about the ethical foundations and implications of psychology. 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.