Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology © 2010 American Psychological Association

2010, Vol. 30, No. 2, 94 –108 1068-8471/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0020290

Improving Moral Judgments: Philosophical Considerations

Annemarie Kalis
Utrecht University

In contemporary moral psychology, an often-heard claim is that knowing how we make

moral judgments can help us make better moral judgments. Discussions about moral
development and improvement are often framed in terms of the question of which mental
processes have a better chance of leading to good moral judgments. However, few studies
elaborate on the question of what makes a moral judgment a good moral judgment. This
article examines what is needed to answer questions of moral improvement and develop-
ment. It distinguishes 3 types of claims that are at stake: descriptive claims, metaethical
claims, and normative claims. To find out what makes certain moral judgments better than
others, one needs to have insight in the psychological processes and capacities underlying
moral judgment formation. However, one also needs to address the question of what makes
a moral judgment justified, and this in turn requires a view on the nature of moral goodness
and on the question of what makes a judgment moral at all. The author discusses possible
ways in which philosophical theories in the areas of metaethics and normative ethics can
contribute to the answering of such questions. Also, she provides concrete suggestions for
doing interdisciplinary research that is able to address those questions in moral psychology
that have both normative and descriptive aspects.

Keywords: moral judgments, moral psychology, normativity, normative ethics, metaethics

In recent years, the neuroscientific and psy-
chological study of moral behavior and moral
decision making has been rapidly expanding
(Greene & Haidt, 2002; Sinnott-Armstrong,
2008; Wallace, 2005). Central questions in this
field are the following: What brain processes are
involved in moral decisions and behavior
(Casebeer, 2003; Greene & Haidt, 2002)? What
is the role of rational deliberation in moral judg-
ment formation (Fine, 2006; Horgan & Tim-
mons, 2007; Pizarro & Bloom, 2003), and what
is the role of emotions (Jones, 2006; Nichols,
2008; Prinz, 2006)? Several authors have em-
phasized that knowledge about how people
make moral judgments can also tell us how to
make better moral judgments, that psychologi-
cal insights can contribute to the improvement
of human moral skills (Fine, 2006; Haidt, 2001;
Thagard, 2007). However, to determine what
role processes such as rational reflection and
emotions can play in improving one’s moral
judgments, one first needs to answer the ques-
tion of what makes certain moral judgments
better than others. In other words, the question
of how to improve moral judgments should be
preceded by another question: What would “im-
provement” consist of? The claim that a moral
judgment is a good moral judgment can mean
different things. To name a few examples, it can
mean that the content of the judgment somehow
reflects a moral truth, or it can mean that the
judgment is good in that it has been reached by
means of a sound method. In this article, I argue
that recent work in moral psychology is in need
of more explicit “criteria of quality,” and that
some influential distinctions from philosophical
ethics could contribute to the development of
such criteria.

Annemarie Kalis, Ethics Institute, Department of Philos-

ophy, Utrecht University. The Issue of Improvement in Moral
I thank Robert Heeger, Ineke Bolt, Maartje Schermer, and Psychology
Micha Werner for their valuable comments on a draft of this
article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
The Debate About Moral Development
dressed to Annemarie Kalis, Ethics Institute, Utrecht Uni-
versity, Heidelberglaan 8, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Nether- The idea that some moral judgments are better
lands. E-mail: A.Kalis@uu.nl than others plays an important role in psycholog-
94
 IMPROVING MORAL JUDGMENTS
ical research; it has a long tradition in the work on
moral development and moral education. Central
issues in this debate, which blossomed in the
1960s partly in response to the work of Lawrence
Kohlberg (Kohlberg, 1958), are questions such as
how people develop moral skills, and what social
and educational structures contribute to (or ham-
per) the development of such skills. Within this
extensive field of research, different traditions can
be distinguished. The behaviorist tradition, repre-
sented by authors such as Durkheim (1961) and
Bandura (Bandura & McDonald, 1963), is based
on the assumption that all moral skills must be
learned from the social environment, that human
beings do not possess any inborn moral abilities.
Developing such skills thus requires certain forms
of social learning. A completely different picture
has been brought forward by the psychoanalytic
tradition: Psychoanalysts argue that moral devel-
opment consists of finding a good balance be-
tween one’s instinctual (mainly sexual) impulses
and the requirements of society (Emden, Johnson,
& Easterbrooks, 1990; Freud, 1930/1961; Meiss-
ner, 2003). In this tradition, developing one’s
moral skills involves active suppression of inborn
tendencies. On the other hand, authors such as
Piaget (1965) and Kohlberg (1958) emphasize
that human beings are different from other ani-
mals because they possess reasoning skills, and
that moral development consists precisely of a
development of these cognitive skills. Whereas
Piaget focused on moral development in young
children, Kohlberg developed a stage model of
moral development covering development into
adulthood. He distinguished six stages of moral
reasoning ranging from a moral orientation that is
based merely on notions of obedience and punish-
ment (Stage 1) to moral reasoning based on uni-
versal and abstract principles (Stage 6). Kohl-
berg’s work has been criticized for different
reasons (for an overview, see Rest, Narvaez,
Bebeau, & Thoma, 1999). As a result of these
debates, several adaptations of Kohlberg’s stage
model have been developed (Gilligan, 1982;
Turiel, 1983).
In trying to get a grip on the complicated issue
of moral development, researchers in all these
psychological traditions have made claims about
what makes certain moral judgments better than
others, claims about what “moral maturity” con-
sists of. Some authors have paid extensive atten-
tion to the normative assumptions underlying their
psychological hypotheses. The most notable ex-
95
ample is Kohlberg, who explicitly based his
model of moral development on a Kantian ap-
proach to morality (Kohlberg, 1981). He argued
for what he labeled methodological nonrelativism
(Kohlberg, 1971), a method that was based on
John Rawls’s version of Kantianism (Kohlberg,
1981; Rawls, 1971). This approach constituted
Kohlberg’s theoretical basis for his claim that
higher stages of moral reasoning are better than
earlier stages. Given its Kantian philosophical
foundation, his model has been criticized for being
vulnerable to the same objections that can be
made against Kantianism in general (Rest et al.,
1999). On the other hand, psychologists working
in behaviorist and psychoanalytic traditions have
been criticized for basing their psychological hy-
potheses on unreflected common opinions about
what we take to be morally right and morally
wrong (Kohlberg, 1971; Turiel, 2008).
Whereas the normative basis of psychologi-
cal research on moral development was at least
an explicit topic of discussion in earlier tradi-
tions, most recent literature on the psychology
and neuroscience of moral judgment formation
does not seem to make use of the insights
gained in these discussions (Turiel, 2008). One
interesting question is why this would be so.
One influential point of criticism raised against
Kohlberg’s work was that it was based solely on
the notion of justice and ignored other possible
normative grounds for good moral decision
making (Gilligan, 1982). This problem of one-
sidedness in the theoretical position adopted by
Kohlberg might have led psychologists to re-
frain from taking a philosophical stance in gen-
eral. Also, regardless of a growing interest in
interdisciplinary research, current scientific
practice is still largely focused on specialization
and not on combining insights from different
academic fields. However, as I argue below,
many contemporary psychologists working in
moral psychology implicitly do venture beyond
the domain of empirical investigation: The sub-
ject matter they are concerned with requires
them to make certain assumptions regarding the
question of what makes some moral judgments
better than others.
Contemporary Moral Psychology
Jonathan Haidt has gained widespread atten-
tion with his work on the role of intuitive pro-
cesses in moral judgment formation (Haidt,
96 KALIS
2001; Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008). Briefly sum-
marized, Haidt claims that most moral judg-
ments are caused by instant feelings of approval
and disapproval. When people think that it is
morally wrong to have sex with one’s sibling,
for example, this moral judgment is the result of
primitive emotional responses such as disgust.
Rational deliberation hardly plays a causal role
in the generation of moral judgments: Most of
the time, it is used merely to provide post hoc
rationalizations (Haidt, 2001). Haidt’s claims
have given rise to a lively debate (Fine, 2006;
Horgan & Timmons, 2007; Kennett & Fine,
2009; Levy, 2006; Pizarro & Bloom, 2003;
Saltzstein & Kasachkoff, 2004). Some have ob-
jected that Haidt presents an exaggeratedly
bleak picture of human moral capacities, that he
claims that our presumed moral capacities are
largely illusory (Fine, 2006). Against such ob-
jections, Haidt has argued that his model “does
state that moral reasoning is less trustworthy
than many people think. . . . But the alternative
to reason is not chaos, but intuition. Intuitive
and automatic processes are much smarter than
many people think” (Haidt & Bjorklund, 2008,
p. 216). To emphasize this point, Haidt has
presented possible ways to use insights in psy-
chological processes to improve our skills in
making good moral judgments. He argues that
methods such as creating the right moral envi-
ronment and stimulating reasoning processes
and discussion with others would lead to the
questioning and possible adaptation of one’s
intuitions (Haidt, 2001). In his view, moral de-
velopment benefits most from a combination of
implicit learning and explicit discussion. Thus,
whereas Haidt emphasizes the importance of
intuitions in describing how people actually
make moral judgments, he assigns a role to both
intuitive and reasoning processes in contribut-
ing to improvement. However, he does not de-
fend any view on the question of what “im-
provement” would consist of.
Another example is found in the work of
Cordelia Fine (2006), who criticizes Haidt’s
claim that “reason is the slave of the passions,”
to use the Humean phrase. Against this claim,
she argues that people certainly have the possi-
bility to overrule their intuitive processes by
cognitive control (see also Kennett & Fine,
2009). Furthermore, she shows that people can
successfully suppress their automatic moral
judgments when they believe that these judg-
ments are morally objectionable, for instance,
because they are stereotypic. Here, an interest-
ing distinction is introduced between automatic
moral judgments (called by Fine “automatic,
stereotypic moral judgments”) and higher level
moral judgments that make us want to suppress
our automatic moral judgments (Fine calls these
“consciously held nonprejudiced beliefs”). Fine
does not elaborate on this distinction, but the
idea is clearly that the second are better moral
judgments than the first. For example, she refers
to stereotypic judgments as being inaccurate.
Also, she argues that we can improve the qual-
ity of our moral judgments by explicit reasoning
and critical reflection. Just as in Haidt’s article,
Fine thus appeals to a notion of “good moral
judgment” without making explicit what she
means by it. She employs concepts such as the
absence of prejudice and egalitarianism, but she
does not elaborate on these notions.
A third author making this kind of implicit
normative claim is Joshua Greene (2003).
Greene provides a subtle and philosophically
sophisticated analysis of the normative implica-
tions of empirical work on moral judgment for-
mation. In an introduction, he states, “There is a
growing consensus that moral judgments are
based largely on intuition. . . . Are all moral
intuitions equally worthy of our allegiance, or
are some more reliable than others?” (Greene,
2003, p. 847). In raising the normative question
about which moral intuitions are “worthy of our
allegiance,” Greene appeals to a notion of qual-
ity: Apparently, moral judgments based on cer-
tain intuitions are better than others. However,
Greene does not elaborate on the question of
what makes some moral judgments better than
others.
A final example can be found in Thagard
(2007), who is concerned with decisions that
involve a conflict of interest: cases where peo-
ple make decisions in favor of their own inter-
ests while neglecting a responsibility they have
to look after the interests of others. Thagard
argues that insights in the neuropsychological
processes underlying such decisions may “re-
duce the prevalence of immoral decisions de-
riving from conflicts of interests” (Thagard,
2007, p. 378). He acknowledges that the claim
that such decisions are immoral needs to be
defended in its own right, but as he takes the
claim to be easy to defend, he does not elaborate
on this issue further: “There is . . . no doubt that
 IMPROVING MORAL JUDGMENTS
acting under the influence of a conflict of inter-
est is often morally wrong” (Thagard, 2007, p.
377).
So, whereas several authors refer to moral
judgments as having a certain quality (as some
being better than others), these authors hardly
discuss the question of what such quality con-
sists of. In the remainder of this article, I argue
that providing an answer to this question in-
volves making not only descriptive claims
about moral judgments (the traditional domain
of moral psychology), but that it also involves
making two other types of claims about moral-
ity: normative claims and metaethical claims.
The next section introduces these three types of
claims. As I try to show, philosophical ethics
could provide valuable contributions to the field
of moral psychology by providing theoretical
frameworks for both normative and metaethical
claims.
Three Types of Claims About Morality
The core of the debate on moral psychology
consists of descriptive claims: claims about how
we come to make moral judgments (Casebeer,
2003; Greene, 2003; Greene & Haidt, 2002;
Haidt, 2001; Koenigs et al., 2007; Moll & de
Oliveira-Souza, 2007; Prinz, 2006). This dis-
cussion employs a very specific definition of
moral judgments. Moral judgments are defined
as claims or statements with moral content
made by human beings in everyday situations.
Prinz (2006), for example, states that his aim is
to give an analysis of our ordinary moral con-
cepts: “It’s a question about what goes on in our
heads when we use moral terms like ‘good’ and
‘bad’ or ‘right’ and wrong’” (Prinz, 2006, p.
40). These authors are thus concerned with the
question, If someone says, “It is wrong to do
A,” how has this statement come about? Let us
imagine that someone named Laura makes the
moral claim, “It is morally wrong for companies
to award lavish bonuses to their CEOs.” The
descriptive question is, How did Laura’s judg-
ment come about? Is it the result of reflection or
of automatic, emotional processes? This is a
question on a descriptive level. It is a question
that can be answered by psychological theories
and data, and this is precisely what the data of
Haidt and other moral psychologists are about.
Haidt’s answer, for instance, would be that al-
though Laura’s moral statement might seem to
97
be based on reflection, it is actually caused by
other things. For instance, her upbringing might
have provided her with a strong gut feeling that
material wealth should be distributed evenly.
Of course, any answer to the question of how
to improve our moral skills will consist partly of
descriptive claims. After all, suggestions for
improvement should be based on what we know
about the psychological and maybe also neural
processes involved in moral judgment forma-
tion. But thinking about improvement also re-
quires thinking about the content of those moral
judgments, and this leads us into the realm of
normative ethics and metaethics.
The distinction between normative claims
and metaethical claims is a common one in
ethics (Couture & Nielsen, 1995; Garner &
Rosen, 1967). Normative claims are claims
about which things are morally wrong and mor-
ally right. Examples of normative claims are
“acting under the influence of a conflict of in-
terest is morally wrong” or “it is morally wrong
for companies to award lavish bonuses to their
CEOs.” Normative ethics is the subdiscipline
within ethics that provides justificatory frame-
works for normative claims: examples of such
frameworks are Kantian deontology and utili-
tarianism. Normative claims thus form the con-
tent of everyday moral judgments. On the other
hand, metaethical claims are claims about the
scope of the moral domain and the nature of
moral judgments in general. Metaethics is un-
derstood as a subdiscipline of ethics specifically
concerned with clarifying the meaning and
metaphysical status of moral judgments; it pro-
vides “metareflection” on the concepts and
claims made in normative ethics (Garner &
Rosen, 1967; Sinnott-Armstrong & Timmons,
1996). Important questions in metaethics are,
What do terms like right, wrong, and good
mean? What makes a judgment a moral judg-
ment? Do moral judgments refer to universal
truths, to social conventions, or to something
else? Examples of metaethical claims are
“moral judgments are judgments about social
norms” and “moral judgments are either true or
false.” Whereas the domain of metaethics cov-
ers various issues, what all metaethical theories
have in common is that they reflect on the status
or nature of moral judgments in general.
The roles of psychology, metaethics, and nor-
mative ethics in research on moral judgments
are clarified in Figure 1. Moral judgments can
98
Normative ethics
concerned with justificatory
principles for moral judgments
Figure 1. The roles of psychology, metaethics, and normative ethics in research on moral
judgments.
be justified by means of normative theories.
Whereas psychological theories investigate the
underlying processes involved in the formation
of such judgments, meaethical theories provide
a “metareflection” on the status and nature of
moral judgments in general.
As shown in the previous section, recent
studies in moral psychology frequently make a
combination of descriptive, normative, and me-
taethical claims about morality. However, only
rarely are the normative and metaethical claims
justified or embedded within a theoretical
framework. The next section discusses ways in
which recent work in moral psychology could
benefit from philosophical insights on these
topics.
The Role of Metaethics in Moral
Psychology
As said, moral psychology is concerned with
actual moral statements that human beings
make in their everyday lives. However, things
get confused when authors start to argue that
sometimes people are not making real moral
judgments. Several authors claim this about
psychopaths; an example can be found in Prinz
(2006). Although psychopaths can make moral
KALIS
Metaethics
concerned with the scope of morality and
the status and nature of moral judgments
Moral judgments
Psychology
concerned with the psychological and
neural processes involved in moral
judgment formation
statements such as “I think that killing is mor-
ally wrong,” according to Prinz, they do not
really hold that killing is morally wrong: They
do not make genuine moral judgments (for other
recent work on moral impairment associated
with psychopathy, see Blair, 2007; Glenn,
Raine, & Schug, 2009). To answer the question
of whether psychopaths make real moral judg-
ments, one needs to have factual knowledge
about psychopaths’ moral capacities, but one
also needs to know what it means to make a real
moral judgment. This is no longer a descriptive
question but a metaethical one. Different me-
taethical theories present different views on
what characterizes “real” moral judgments. This
implies, for example, that different metaethical
positions defend different positions on the ques-
tion of whether psychopaths make “real” moral
judgments (Kennett & Fine, 2008; for a differ-
ent view, see Roskies, 2003).
The question of what makes moral statements
“real” moral judgments has received growing
attention in the field of moral psychology
(Jones, 2006; Joyce, 2006). This can, for exam-
ple, be observed in Haidt and Bjorklund (2008).
In that article, the authors discuss an empirical
study on hypnotically induced disgust. In that
study, they used hypnosis techniques that made
 IMPROVING MORAL JUDGMENTS
participants experience a pang of disgust every
time they heard the word often. As a result,
some of those participants rated a completely
benevolent action (the story describes a student
making efforts to stimulate constructive debate
between professors and students) as morally
objectionable, if and only if the description of
the action contained the term often. Haidt and
Bjorklund (2008) conclude from these data that
moral judgments are caused by gut feelings.
However, what they actually say is that moral
statements are caused by gut feelings, and that
these moral statements can be considered gen-
uine moral judgments. However, they do not
give arguments for the second claim. Many
authors in the field of moral psychology not
only defend a certain explanation of the origins
of our moral statements, but they also take
position with regard to the question of which
statements reflect genuine moral judgments.
That is, they explicitly defend a certain view on
what a real moral judgment is: a metaethical
view. The metaethical position that many moral
psychologists seem to embrace is sentimental-
ism (Joyce, 2006; Nichols, 2008; Prinz, 2006).
According to sentimentalism, to judge that
something is morally wrong means to have a
sentiment, or an emotional disposition, of dis-
approbation toward it (Nichols, 2008; Prinz,
2006). Prinz (2006) for instance defines a moral
judgment as a tendency to respond to a state of
affairs with certain emotions. To say that I hold
the moral judgment that it is wrong to kill just
means that I am predisposed to respond with
emotions like anger to instances of killing.
So, if we apply this to Laura’s statement that
“it is morally wrong for companies to award
lavish bonuses to their CEOs,” we would say
that she is making a real moral judgment if she
has a disposition to respond to certain decisions
made by companies regarding bonuses with
emotions like anger and indignation. In a com-
ment on Prinz, the philosopher Jones (2006) has
objected that such a sentimentalist position is
problematic, and has developed an alternative
metaethical view. Jones argues, by means of a
metaethical analysis, that for Laura’s statement to
be a real moral judgment, Laura must believe her
moral statement to be justified. She must have
reasons for her emotional response of anger and
indignation. For example, if Laura’s statement is
a real moral judgment, she will be inclined to
respond with indignation to certain decisions of
99
companies because she takes these decisions to
be unfair or because she takes these decisions to
be harmful for certain people. It is not necessary
that people are consciously aware of such rea-
sons for their emotional reactions, but somehow
such reasons must play a role. In Jones’s terms,
real moral judgments are reasons-responsive.
She explains this by commenting on the hypno-
sis induction experiments. Let’s say that after
the experiment, the participants were debriefed:
They were told that their moral reactions were
manipulated by hypnotic suggestion. Jones asks
us to imagine a participant, call him Harry, who
would not change his moral statements after
being debriefed. Even though he now knows
that these statements were manipulated by hyp-
nosis, Harry would keep saying that it is mor-
ally wrong to stimulate constructive debate
between professors and students. Would we
consider Harry’s statement to be a real moral
judgment? Jones argues that sentimentalists like
Prinz would need to maintain this. After all,
Harry’s statement is an expression of a tendency
to respond with certain emotions. But this is
strongly counterintuitive, according to Jones.
She argues that we do not consider Harry’s
statement to be a real moral judgment because it
is not reasons-responsive. Because of the de-
briefing, Harry now knows that he does not have
reasons for responding to the case with the
moral emotions he feels. If Harry’s statement
was a real moral judgment, he would have re-
tracted his statement after finding out that he did
not have any reasons for making it. In other
words, Jones claims that our moral statements
are only real moral judgments insofar as we
believe them to be justified.
This implies that different metaethical ap-
proaches lead to different interpretations of psy-
chological data. So, how could metaethical the-
ories contribute to psychological research on
moral judgments? As said, one of the questions
that metaethics is concerned with is the question
of the delineation of the moral domain: What
makes a certain judgment a moral judgment?
Philosophical work on this point (such as Gert,
2005; Harman, 1977; Joyce, 2001) could help in
clarifying whether one sees moral judgments as
being in any sense different from emotional
judgments or social judgments. For instance,
several researchers working in the tradition of
evolutionary biology and psychology (De Waal,
2009; Moll et al., 2006) tend to identify moral
100 KALIS
judgments with judgments that express a proso-
cial attitude. Although this is not necessarily
problematic, it is clearly only one of the possi-
ble interpretations of the essence of morality.
Also, as shown, metaethical theories could
prove fruitful in debates about the status of
judgments made by people suffering from psy-
chopathy or autism.
As a second type of contribution, metaethical
theories offer a spectrum of definitions of good-
ness, which researchers could use in clarifying
and specifying their notions of quality and im-
provement. I outline some general steps such a
process of clarification could take. First, one
should ask oneself, When referring to the qual-
ity of moral judgments, am I referring to their
moral quality or to other ways in which a judg-
ment can be good? After all, moral judgments
can be good or bad in nonmoral ways as well:
They can promote certain nonmoral values. To
give an example, a moral judgment can be good
in that it is accepted as valid within a certain
political, social, or cultural community. Also, it
can be good in the sense that it follows the laws
of logical inference. This is not the same as
saying that the judgment is good in that it is
morally justified. However, the delineation be-
tween moral and nonmoral criteria of quality is
not always easy to make. Insofar as one holds
that criteria for moral justification can be de-
rived from principles of logic (as some norma-
tive theories do; see Illies, 2003), making a bad
moral judgment is essentially the same as mak-
ing an illogical judgment. This brings us to the
second step: If one is concerned with the moral
justification of judgments, what does one take
moral justification to mean?
One important difference here is between
people who believe that moral justification is a
concept that is necessarily universal in scope,
and those who hold that it is not. The question
is, Is it possible that, for example, the practice
of awarding large corporate bonuses is morally
justified in one society but not in another? And
thus, is it possible that a judgment condemning
such a practice is morally better in one society
than in another? The scope of moral justification
is a large issue in metaethical debate, and the
position one takes on this issue is highly rele-
vant for work in moral psychology. After all,
how one interprets psychological data on cul-
tural and social variations in moral judgments
depends on (among other things) one’s view on
the scope of moral justification. Crudely said, if
one finds that citizens of the southern states of
the United States have certain moral views that
oppose views held in the northern states (Nis-
bett & Cohen, 1996), the practical implications
of such results highly depend on whether one
thinks that only one of those opposing views
can be right. Some argue that this is an incorrect
way to phrase the problem (Doris & Plakias,
2008): They argue that if normative disagree-
ment turns out to be intractable, this empirical
fact might itself threaten the idea that moral
judgments are either wrong or right. However, it
only does insofar as one holds that if moral
judgments are either wrong or right, it must be
possible for most human beings to find out
which ones are wrong and which ones are right.
And this, again, is not an empirical claim but a
claim about the nature of morality.
Such reflections on the meaning and nature of
morality and moral judgments can thus help in
determining one’s theoretical starting points
and in clarifying what practical conclusions one
could draw on the basis of one’s empirical re-
sults. The different steps in such a reflective
process are summarized in Figure 2.
As explained above, metaethical theorizing
should be seen as conceptual clarification of the
meaning and status of concepts such as morality
and the good. Such general reflections form the
background for specific normative claims,
which are attempts to answer the questions of
which judgments or actions are morally justi-
fied, and what makes them morally justified.
Such normative claims thus give more concrete
content to notions of the moral good and moral
justification, and show how these notions could
be applied to concrete actions and judgments. In
the next section, I outline how contemporary
work in moral psychology involves making nor-
mative assumptions, and how normative theo-
ries could contribute to the clarification of such
assumptions.
The Role of Normative Theories in Moral
Psychology
As said, normative ethics is the discipline that
is concerned with the question of what makes
behavior morally right or morally wrong. For
instance, one could ask why it would be morally
wrong if companies award lavish bonuses to
their CEOs. Different normative theories pro-
 IMPROVING MORAL JUDGMENTS
good
= justified by
moral criteria
universal moral non-universal
criteria moral criteria
Figure 2. Overview of basic reflective steps for answering the question, What makes a
moral judgment a good judgment?
vide different answers to this question. The dif-
ferent normative theories are all concrete mod-
els for moral justification; they thus belong in
the left half of Figure 2. Models of nonmoral
justification are not part of the domain of moral
philosophy, but are instead found in fields such
as political philosophy, sociology, and econom-
ics. The major normative theories found in con-
temporary moral philosophy are utilitarianism,
deontology, and virtue ethics. I briefly introduce
each approach and show how each theory
should be placed within the structure outlined in
Figure 2.
Utilitarian theories state that those acts are
morally right (even morally prescribed) that
maximize utility (Brandt, 1979; Singer, 1993).
In such an account, certain decisions made by
companies regarding bonuses might be morally
objectionable because these decisions would re-
sult in less overall utility than some other pos-
sible decisions. Most important, this requires an
account of what utility consists of: Is it pleasure,
happiness, welfare, or something else? Differ-
ent versions of utilitarianism constitute differ-
ent answers to this question. With regard to the
distinctions made in Figure 2, it is important to
note that utilitarianism as a theory is universal
in its scope: It states that every moral decision
made by every possible entity might be assessed
101
= justified by non-
moral criteria
social criteria
political criteria
economic
criteria
(...)
by calculating its expected utility compared
with other possible decisions. Moreover, what
is characteristic about utilitarianism is that it
derives its moral principle from a value that is in
itself not moral, namely the “neutral” value of
utility.
This latter point is what distinguishes utili-
tarian theories from deontological ones. There
are different kinds of deontological theories, but
what they share is that they claim that their
justificatory principles are based on values that
are themselves moral values. For example,
Rawls’s (1971) version of Kantian deontology
was based on the value of justice, which he
argued to be a universal moral value. Most
deontological theories offer justificatory princi-
ples that are universal in scope, but this is not
necessarily so. After all, it is possible to defend
that moral judgments can be justified by refer-
ring to moral values that are not universal val-
ues; such a view would still count as a deonto-
logical theory.
A completely different way of developing
justificatory norms for moral judgments is to
ask, What moral judgments would a good or
virtuous person embrace? Such an approach
shifts the focus from assessing specific moral
claims to a moral assessment of persons as a
whole. This is the starting point of virtue ethics,
102 KALIS
which has its background in Aristotelian philos-
ophy (Anscombe, 1958; Slote, 2001). Virtue
ethicists have developed elaborate accounts of
human flourishing, a term they use to refer to
optimal development of human beings. This
also covers optimal moral development: The
idea that well-being, flourishing, and moral
quality all come together is characteristic of
virtue ethics. Different views exist regarding the
question of what kind of physical, psychologi-
cal, and social capacities are required for a
human being to flourish and thus to become a
good person. Some virtue theories are universal
in scope: Such theories claim that there are
certain characteristics and capacities that uni-
versally contribute to human flourishing. Other
virtue approaches are narrower in scope and
state that what contributes to flourishing might
depend on the cultural and social context of the
person.
Do the authors I have been discussing in the
first half of this article embrace a specific nor-
mative theory? Haidt and Bjorklund (2008)
elaborate somewhat on the normative back-
ground of Haidt’s moral psychology. They ar-
gue that there exist “anthropocentric moral
truths”: moral claims that are true with respect
to all human beings. These moral truths are
moral values that are widely shared all over the
world. They are partly innate and partly shaped
by one’s culture and social environment during
development. This shows that they start from
the assumption that moral justification is uni-
versal in scope. The five core moral values as
they formulate them are
1. Sensitivity to harm: Sensitivity to signs of
pain and suffering in others;
2. Reciprocity: Emotional responses related
to playing tit-for-tat;
3. Hierarchy: Concerns about navigating sta-
tus hierarchies;
4. Purity: Concerns about cleanness, related
to the emotion of disgust; and
5. Boundaries between in-group and out-
group: Emotions related to loyalty and
special concerns for one’s own group.
To give one example, “Motherhood requires
loving and caring for one’s children.” Haidt and
Bjorklund’s (2008) claim about this moral judg-
ment is that “every human being instantly rec-
ognizes it as being true” (p. 214). How would
this normative view be a basis for a theory of
good moral judgment? What seems to follow
from Haidt and Bjorklund’s normative position
is this: A good moral judgment is a moral judg-
ment that is held on the basis of one or more of
these moral truths (that is, held for reasons of
sensitivity to harm, reciprocity, hierarchy, pu-
rity, or in-group– out-group boundaries). But in
fact, this is not what Haidt and Bjorklund claim.
They acknowledge that there is a lot of dis-
agreement about the moral values of hierarchy,
purity, and in-group– out-group boundaries:
“American liberals in particular seem quite un-
comfortable with the outputs of those modules,
because they often lead to jingoistic patriotism
(ingroup), legitimization of inequality (hierar-
chy) and rules or practices that treat certain
ethnic groups as contagious (purity, as in the
segregation laws of the American South)” (p.
209). Whereas purity, hierarchy, and in-group–
out-group boundaries constitute moral truths, it
is not the case that every moral judgment that
reflects these truths is itself a moral truth. If it is
not merely its foundation in one of the core
moral values, what makes a moral judgment
justified? At some point, Haidt and Bjorklund
seem to claim that for a moral judgment to be a
justified judgment, it must be widely shared.
They state that “A well-formed moral system is
one that is endorsed by the great majority of its
members, even those who appear, from the out-
side, to be its victims” (p. 216). By being a little
charitable, we can interpret the notion of a moral
system as a set of moral judgments. By combin-
ing this claim with their claim about the five
core moral values, we could formulate the view
that justified moral judgments are those that
have their foundation in one or more of the core
moral values and are endorsed by the great
majority of its members, even those who appear
to be its victims. However, we still cannot con-
sider this to be a satisfactory notion of “good
moral judgment.” Haidt and Bjorklund have not
dealt with the obvious objection against such a
view: If the majority of the Jews had embraced
the moral judgment that it was morally right to
annihilate them for reasons of purity and in-
group– out-group boundaries, would that have
made the judgment justified? Haidt and Bjork-
lund do have a (possibly justified) optimistic
 IMPROVING MORAL JUDGMENTS
view of the shared moral intuitions that the
evolutionary process has predisposed us to:
Most of those moral intuitions are aimed at
social cooperation and survival of the species.
However, the mere fact that most of our widely
shared moral intuitions contribute to social co-
operation and survival does not make them jus-
tified moral judgments. Stereotypic judgments,
for example, might also contribute to social
cooperation and survival, but we nevertheless
do not consider such judgments to be justified.
Haidt and Bjorklund (2008) thus have some
kind of normative theory: They have identified
five core moral values, and thus have given an
account of the things that we consider morally
right and morally wrong. However, they cannot
show how one can derive justified moral judg-
ments from this theory. As a result, they do not
have a satisfactory answer to the question of
what constitutes a good moral judgment.
Prinz (2006) takes a different approach to this
issue: His goal is to analyze our common use of
moral terms such as right and wrong. At the end
of his article, he briefly discusses normative
theories: He states that normative theories “can-
not be defended as plausible analyses of ordi-
nary moral concepts. . . . They are best under-
stood as proposals for replacing ordinary moral
concepts, not as analyses of them” (p. 40). This
seems to me a correct but rather mundane ob-
servation; every normative theorist will agree
that normative theory is normative, and not de-
scriptive, in nature. In any case, Prinz’s state-
ment makes clear that he is not interested in this
normative enterprise, but in the analysis of our
ordinary moral concepts. Prinz himself does not
seem to start from a specific normative theory.
Nevertheless, he makes certain general claims
about the justification of moral claims. For ex-
ample, he argues that my moral judgments are
justified insofar as I hold them “under condi-
tions of full factual knowledge and reflection,
and freedom from emotional biases that I my-
self would deem as unrelated to the matter at
hand” (Prinz, p. 35). Let’s analyze these criteria
in more detail. To begin with the first, they must
occur under conditions of full factual knowl-
edge. Prinz elaborates on this by explaining
how moral judgments can be in error because
they result from a lack of knowledge. Let’s say
that it turns out that Laura is completely wrong
about current bonus policies. That would make
her moral judgment unjustified. Prinz’s second
103
criterion is that a justified moral judgment oc-
curs under conditions of reflection. Unfortu-
nately, he does not really elaborate on the role
of reflection. And third, he claims that a justified
moral judgment is free from emotional influ-
ences that the person deems unrelated to the
matter at hand. This is an interesting normative
claim; however, it immediately raises the ques-
tion, How do we distinguish relevant emotional
dispositions from unrelated emotional influ-
ences? An answer requires a theory that identi-
fies certain elements as relevant to the matter at
hand: a theory that identifies good reasons for
having an emotional disposition. This is what
normative theories do. For example, one could
back up Prinz’s view of moral judgment with a
utilitarian normative theory. The normative
starting point would be that those actions are
morally right that maximize utility. A corre-
sponding view of justification would be that a
moral judgment is justified if it uses knowledge
relevant for maximizing utility and if it is free of
emotions that have nothing to do with maximiz-
ing utility. Prinz formulates some criteria for
normative justification, but because he does not
make his normative starting points explicit,
these criteria remain empty boxes.
So, how could normative theories contrib-
ute to the development and interpretation of
research in moral psychology? A first possi-
bility is to start with a descriptive question
on, for example, moral reasoning, develop-
ment, or judgment formation, and examine
the normative concepts used while developing
this question into an empirical paradigm. For
example, one could ask the descriptive ques-
tion of whether and when everyday moral
reasoning involves making utility calcula-
tions: calculations of the expected rewards
and costs of one’s options. Whereas this is a
purely descriptive question, psychological
theories of decision making employ certain
standards of adequacy (derived from econom-
ics) that might not be identical to moral
standards of adequacy (Tobler, Kalis, &
Kalenscher, 2008). It, therefore, would be
worthwhile to combine such an empirical
project with a normative analysis, examining
when it is morally desirable to decide on the
basis of utility calculations and when it is not.
In such a way, a descriptive study might not
only lead to factual knowledge on strategies
of moral decision making, but can also con-
104 KALIS
tribute to a normative assessment of such
strategies. Another way to develop studies in
moral psychology is to begin with a certain
normative position and to examine empirical
hypotheses that can be generated on the basis
of this position. A possible area where such
research would be fruitful is the field of virtue
ethics. As already mentioned, one of the
claims made by virtue theories is that moral
assessment should take place on the level of
the person, and that to become a virtuous
person, one should develop certain capacities.
One of the capacities frequently mentioned is
practical wisdom (or the Greek term phrone-
sis). The idea is that to make good moral
decisions, one needs to be sensitive to con-
text: One needs to see what are “evaluatively
relevant” features of particular situations.
Also, being a good person requires flexibility:
One needs to be able to adapt to changes in
the situation. These philosophical theories on
practical wisdom could form a theoretical ba-
sis for an interesting line of interdisciplinary
research. Moral psychology could try to de-
velop more concrete and specific notions of
practical wisdom, contributing to the identi-
fication of the kinds of capacities and psycho-
logical mechanisms involved in making vir-
tuous moral decisions. Existing psychological
work on the notion of wisdom could be useful
in this respect (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2006;
Sternberg & Jordan, 2005). Again, such work
would only make sense if combined with an
assessment of the normative validity of a vir-
tue– ethical approach.
The possibilities presented above raise an
important issue, which also played a role in
the discussion of Kohlberg’s work on moral
psychology. It is clear that there are different
competing approaches to moral philosophy:
Some philosophers defend a deontological
theory of morality, there are those who call
themselves utilitarians, some take a virtue–
theoretical approach (and, of course, there are
also moral philosophers defending an ap-
proach that does not belong to either of these
three major schools). But how should the field
of moral psychology deal with this existing
plurality in moral theories? Philosophers are
keen to emphasize that normative theories are
mutually exclusive: Those that defend utili-
tarianism cannot hold that deontological the-
ories are correct as well. This might lead to
the conclusion that everyone doing research
in moral psychology should commit oneself
to one of the existing normative theories,
which would lead to different “philosophical
schools” in moral psychology. One could ar-
gue that Kohlberg himself developed one
such school, by explicitly grounding his re-
search in a Kantian tradition. However, this
precisely constituted one of the major objec-
tions that were brought up against his work.
His explicit moral foundations led others to
conclude that his empirical work seemed
valid only for those who believe that Kant
was right about morality, and narrowing
down of the validity of one’s research is
surely not appealing to psychologists. An-
other problem is that the plurality of moral
approaches available and the lack of consen-
sus might give the impression that one theory
is ultimately as good as another, that one
could just choose the moral theory that best
fits one’s data. So, how to deal with this plu-
rality of normative approaches? In my view, the
main point is that making choices in the norma-
tive domain is something that cannot be avoided
in doing moral psychology. In addressing major
questions on moral development and moral im-
provement, one must use some philosophical
anchor points, some way to think about good-
ness and justification. The choice might not be
between being normatively neutral or being
committed to normative starting points, but
between being implicit or explicit in one’s
normative commitments. The intertwinement
between descriptive and normative issues is
something that is found not only in the field of
moral psychology; it is actually widespread in
psychology in general. Areas such as positive
psychology and health psychology rely on
normative assumptions as well. This seems
inevitable because to investigate topics such
as happiness or health, one needs to take a
stance on what health or happiness is, and this
immediately leads one into the normative
realm. Although this is not necessarily unde-
sirable, it requires an explication and justifi-
cation of the assumptions made. Still, such a
message might evoke substantial resistance in
psychologists: Empirical psychologists are
generally not interested in spreading moral
opinions; they are interested in generating
factual knowledge about psychological pro-
 IMPROVING MORAL JUDGMENTS
cesses. In the next section, I develop possible
strategies to deal with these tensions.
Addressing Normative Issues in Moral
Psychology: Some Suggestions
The main point of the analysis so far has been
that many questions in moral psychology have
normative aspects, and this means that research-
ers cannot avoid making normative choices in
the way they set up and interpret their empirical
studies. I have argued that the best way for
researchers in moral psychology to deal with
this intertwinement is to be much more explicit
about the normative starting points and inter-
pretations they use. My proposal is that the
main thing researchers need to do is make clear
which part of their work is about facts and
which part involves the making of certain state-
ments about values. This does not necessarily
lead to the problems associated with a Kohlber-
gian approach to moral psychology. Most of the
objections against Kohlberg’s work were either
empirical objections or objections to the kind of
normative assumptions he defended: He used a
theory that was much more narrow and restric-
tive than most contemporary normative theo-
ries. However, I expect that most researchers
working in moral psychology would still go
along with his general starting point that the
normative and descriptive dimensions of moral
psychological work should be clearly separated.
In other words, it is possible to adopt this aspect
of Kohlberg’s approach to moral psychology
without having to accept any of his normative or
empirical conclusions.
An important point here is that such separa-
tion makes the factual aspect of moral psycho-
logical work stronger as well. By clearly show-
ing which part of the study is concerned with
empirical description and which part is con-
cerned with normative interpretation, one pre-
cisely avoids the objection that one’s data are
valid only within a certain normative frame-
work. In contrast, by failing to disentangle one’s
empirical data from normative interpretations,
one makes one’s descriptive conclusions much
more vulnerable to objections (Fine, 2006;
Roeser, 2010).
But how should this be done in practice?
Those working in experimental psychology are
trained to develop and analyze scientific exper-
iments that lead to reliable and valid results.
105
They are not trained to address normative issues
in a systematic way. This is what moral philos-
ophers are trained to do—they, on the other
hand, know very little about doing experiments.
The question of whether or not this is a desir-
able state of affairs is beyond the scope of this
article; what is at stake here is the question of
how moral psychology should move forward
given this state of affairs. One relatively
straightforward answer is that to address both
factual and normative aspects of moral psychol-
ogy, research in this field should be developed
by multidisciplinary research teams. This means
that psychologists and moral philosophers
should develop, execute, and report on research
projects together. Within these teams, it would
be the psychologists’ role to focus on the factual
aspects, to contribute relevant descriptive ques-
tions and sound empirical methods for answer-
ing them. It would be the philosophers’ respon-
sibility to generate relevant normative questions
and to assess the explicit and implicit normative
claims made in the research process, both in the
generation of questions and in the discussion of
the empirical results. Whereas such a structure
involves a clear division of labor on the basis of
training and experience, the work of each dis-
cipline can be done only in close collaboration
with the other discipline. Currently, this is not
standard practice: Although there is a growing
body of work relating results in moral psychol-
ogy to philosophical work in normative ethics
and metaethics (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008), psy-
chologists and philosophers most of the time
still work independently of each other. The
main disadvantage of trying to disentangle de-
scriptive and normative aspects of moral psy-
chology only afterward is twofold. First, inter-
esting philosophical choices are often already
made in the process of formulating empirical
hypotheses. For example, Haidt’s hypothesis
was that moral reasoning is in most cases
merely post hoc rationalization. He presents this
hypothesis as a “debunking” of our common-
sense way of thinking about reasons. However,
there exist different views on what our com-
mon-sense way of thinking about reasons is.
One widespread account is in fact that reasons
function not as causal but as rationalizing ex-
planations (Wedgwood, 2007). From such a
philosophical starting point, Haidt’s hypothesis
would not be debunking but actually confirming
our common sense of what moral reasoning
106
does. Because the formulation of empirical hy-
potheses is frequently colored by certain theo-
retical assumptions about the concepts used, it
appears more fruitful to engage in interdiscipli-
nary discussion from the beginning of the re-
search process. The second disadvantage of post
hoc interdisciplinary integration follows from
the fact that the opposite is true as well: The
formulation of normative and metaethical theo-
ries frequently depends on the making of certain
psychological assumptions about mental pro-
cesses and capacities. An example was already
provided for virtue theories and their use of the
notion of practical wisdom. In developing their
accounts of morality and the good, philosophers
could thus benefit greatly from interacting with
psychologists at an early stage in the research
process.
The observation that the relevance of inter-
disciplinary cooperation goes both ways raises
the question, What is the right order in which
research in moral psychology should proceed?
Does one need to start by formulating a clear
normative position and developing empirical
paradigms on the basis of this position, or
should one first get the facts straight and then
develop a normative position that is in accor-
dance with these facts? Neither option appears
attractive. Instead, one could see the process of
doing research in moral psychology as a reiter-
ative process, during which the normative and
descriptive claims brought forward remain open
to reassessment. This means that insofar as
one’s normative claims depend on psychologi-
cal or social facts, new knowledge on these
facts might change such claims. Also, insofar as
one’s descriptive claims depend on a certain
normative or metaethical view, new arguments
concerning that view would affect one’s de-
scriptive claims as well. By engaging in such
critical evaluations within research teams in-
stead of between research teams, one greatly
increases the chance that the process will result
in research that is both normatively and empir-
ically better justified. Such a practice of “inten-
sive interdisciplinarity” seems preferable over
what now and then looks more like a practice of
“mutual debunking.”
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Received March 20, 2009
Revision received May 4, 2010
Accepted May 4, 2010 䡲