Moral Psychology: An Exchange

Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker, reply by Tamsin Shaw

New York Review of Books, April 7, 2016 issue

Tamsin Shaw replies:

Moral psychology is an invaluable aspect of human understanding insofar as it sheds light on the moral capacities and limitations of human beings. And this fact has indeed long been appreciated by philosophers (perhaps by none so much as Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings have been the primary focus of my own scholarly work). The findings of moral psychology have also begun to find a place in the public imagination, via prominent editorials and more popular psychology books. But current research by psychologists in this area has risen to prominence at the same time as an extraordinary moral crisis in their profession, a fact that inevitably lends their reflections a special significance that requires scrutiny.

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