ABSTRACT
In the 2000s, Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues proposed that morality and variations in morality stem from differences in people’s valuing of five moral fundamentals: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. This chapter reviews the several foundational approaches to the psychology of morality and compare them to ethics position theory. For centuries the philosophical analysis of morality was also the rational analysis of morality. Kohlberg, like Piaget, believed that “age developmental trends in moral judgment have a formal cognitive base parallel to the structural base of cognitive development”. Philosophers since the time of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, when examining questions of right and good versus wrong and bad, considered first, and sometimes solely, the rational, logical bases of moral choice and judgment. Morality, they often assumed, balanced the too-human tendency to act on unbridled passions rather than measured reason. Researchers have developed several methods for assessing individuals’ cognitive moral development.
