ABSTRACT
Our colleague John Schopler used to tell us-gleefully, one might addthat whereas philosophy makes the trivial sublime, social psychology makes the sublime trivial. It was with equal measures of enthusiasm and trepidation, then, that we decided to approach a classic problem of philosophy-the question of whether humankind can attain perfection-from a social-psychological perspective. The aforementioned question can be traced through three millennia of intellectual history and, over the course of time, has taken on a variety of meanings (Passmore, 2000). We are concerned here with the question of whether humankind can achieve moral perfection or “can be entirely free of any moral defect” (Passmore, 2000, p. 27).
