Published in Blackwell’s Contemporary Social Issues series, Taking Moral Action has as its goal, “to provide a first overview of the emerging but highly fragmented field of moral psychology. . .for both those beginning in the field and those deep in the weeds and thickets of theoretical controversy” (xiii). Chuck Huff, an American social psychologist, and Almut Furchert, a German continental philosopher who works in the existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic traditions, have teamed up to write an overview text that is unparalleled in its range of topics covered, in its mastery of a vast empirical literature, and in its interdisciplinary engagement with philosophy, theology, history, education, and other fields.
As the quote above indicates, Taking Moral Action also purports to be the first of its kind. As Huff and Furchert note, work in moral psychology can often be siloed, with “no narrative thread that ties it all together. Ours is a first attempt to collect the pearls and to offer a string, or at least to frame the parameters for what such a string would look like” (xvi).
Taking Moral Action is divided into nine core chapters, along with an introduction and brief “coda” at the end. The chapters are organized into three groups of three chapters, each as follows:
Contexts (evolution, neuroscience of moral action, and moral ecology)
Influences (personality, moral identity and the self, and skills and knowledge)
Processes (moral reason, moral emotion, and moral formation: shaping moral action).
Each chapter follows the same basic structure. After most of the chapter reviews relevant material, it ends with a conclusion that draws out multiple themes that have emerged. Then comes an application to a real-life scenario, followed by several paragraphs on open questions which require further research. Finally, each chapter ends with 10 or so recommended further readings before the reference section for that chapter. To give a sense of the amount of research with which Huff and Furchert engage, these reference sections average 6–10 pages in length per chapter.
Let me first offer a very brief summary of the content of the chapters, followed by a few points of engagement.
Chapter one begins by providing relevant background on evolutionary processes like sexual selection, group selection, and gene-culture coevolution. Drawing on work by Dennis Krebs, it considers evolutionary building blocks for morality as well as the degree of human distinctiveness.
Chapter two turns to neuroscience, with discussion of everything from how to use neuroscientific findings, to neuroscience and moral ecology, personality, moral identity, skills, moral reason, moral emotion, and moral formation.
In chapter three the focus is on moral ecology and social influences on moral behavior. Here we get a fairly extensive treatment of moral diversity, as well as sections on organizations, on friendship, and on influencing moral ecology.
Personality is the topic of the first chapter in the “Influences” section. The stress is on personality as adaptive, pluralistic, and integrative, and much of the chapter fleshes out the well-known McAdams framework of traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity. One striking conclusion they draw is that “Virtues are not what make us virtuous” (106), which I will return to below.
Next up is the chapter on moral identity and the self. Huff and Furchert emphasize themes of multidimensionality, variability, and domain specificity with respect to the self. They understand moral identity at least roughly as, “the extent to which moral commitments are integrated into the self” (115) and discuss how moral identity might be helpful in addressing the judgment-action gap. Particularly interesting here is an extensive overview of integrity both with respect to one’s identity and with respect to one’s behavior.
The final chapter in part two is on skills and knowledge. The first half concerns work on general skills that are relevant to moral behavior, especially self-reflection and self-regulation (which includes self-control, self-maintenance, and emotional self-regulation). The second half briefly touches on domain-specific skills and on habits, but mainly focuses on expertise and mature moral functioning.
Part three on processes opens with the chapter on moral reason. The first half provides a very helpful overview and assessment of Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous system, which is followed by an equally extensive review and critique of two-process models. The chapter ends with a brief look at moral failure.
Any overview of moral psychology will plausibly need a chapter on moral emotions, and that is what comes next. Huff and Furchert start by quickly reviewing four theories of emotion: basic emotion, appraisal, cultural, and constructionist. Most of the chapter is devoted to page-long treatments of a long list of particular emotions such as disgust, compassion, and shame.
Finally, the book ends with a very rich chapter on moral formation. It first reviews three traditions of thinking about moral formation from outside of academic moral psychology, namely Bildung, existential appropriation, and monastic/spiritual formation. The bulk of the chapter looks at various aspects of moral formation, including telling stories, self-transcendence, rules vs. goals, and planned moral ecology, and puts work on these concepts in conversation with the three traditions.
Stepping back from the specific chapters, it is worth noting four themes that Huff and Furchert outline in their introduction and return to in the final “coda”. These themes are meant to “weave the text together” (292) and “provide a corrective for an emerging field that tends toward fragmentation” (xxxiii):
A broad search for variety in moral action, influences, and processes.
A concentration on the idiographic experience, choice, and development of the individual.
A focus on the ultimate, normative status of moral claims.
A hope toward educational implications (292).
With this said, let me comment briefly on the intended audience of the book, the scope of topics covered, and two of the substantive claims made.
Since Taking Moral Action is more of an overview book than a research monograph, it is important to be clear on the intended audience. Huff and Furchert start their preface by saying that it is intended to be a book, “for anyone who wants to think carefully about the psychology of morality. . .we have tried to write it to be accessible to any careful reader interested in the topic, regardless of background” (ix). My sense is that the book is pitched well for an advanced undergraduate course in moral psychology, but that parts of it will be hard going for introductory students or a general non-academic reader. At times Huff and Furchert slip into jargon (e.g., “main effect”) and periodically they presuppose familiarity with concepts and research findings that most people won’t have (e.g., they don’t explain the setup of the Milgram studies). The material will be challenging in places even for advanced undergraduates, such as grasping and distinguishing between the cognitive-affective processing system model, Cervone’s personality architecture model, and Roberts and Wood’s neo-socio-analytic model. For the most part, though, the book should be accessible to students and other readers with some background in psychology.
Concerning scope, as should be clear from the summary above, Taking Moral Action covers a ton of ground in moral psychology. Huff and Furchert are to be commended for the range of topics they cover, and for introducing a great deal of material from other fields into their discussion of those topics. My only regret was that there wasn’t a chapter on moral motivation, and specifically on issues related to psychological egoism and the possibility of other kinds of morally relevant motivation such as dutiful and altruistic motives. In my experience, these issues are always of great interest to students, and have been perennial topics in moral philosophy. Dan Batson’s work in particular over the past forty years on empathy and altruism has been especially important and influential, and deserved to be discussed in a book like this (Batson 2011).
Finally let me make two brief comments about substantive parts of the book, both of which have to do with Huff and Furchert’s discussion of virtue and character. Huff and Furchert do devote some space to the influential situationist movement in psychology, and briefly reference the corresponding debate in philosophy that came along later at the turn of the century. Here is what they say about these movements, “Their conclusion is that true morality is either severely limited or not possible” (59). But I don’t think philosophical situationists ever said anything this bold. At most philosophers like Gilbert Harman and John Doris wanted to call into question the widespread possession of the virtues, and use this skepticism as a basis to raise doubts about certain forms of virtue ethics (for much more on the claims of situationism in both psychology and philosophy, see Miller 2014).
My other comment has to do with the seemingly puzzling conclusion of the chapter on personality that, “Virtues are not what make us virtuous” (106). What Huff and Furchert are skeptical about is the existence of virtues (and presumably, all character traits) as psychological entities which individuals can have and which can play a part in the causal explanation of virtuous behavior. Hence, they say that a virtue, “may not be a central psychologically active construct in a virtue-oriented moral psychology” and that it “may not be among the ‘springs of action’”, although virtues could “describe the characteristic ways that individuals differ in acting” (106; see also 94, 103, 157). Instead of virtues, Huff and Furchert claim, we should look to things like “fine-grained appraisal patterns, personal commitments, [and] values” (107) as the psychological causes.
This rejection of virtues as psychologically real dispositions which, when possessed, can play a causal and explanatory role in giving rise to virtuous behavior, stands against the approach of most philosophers who work on character today. It is also unwarranted, as the appeal to other psychological entities like values and commitments sets up a false dichotomy. As I and others have discussed at length, we can just equate virtues with relevant clusters of these psychological entities. Hence the virtue of compassion, for instance, might partially consist of capacities for altruistic motivation and relevant prosocial emotions. A person would then “have” this virtue only if she possesses the relevant underlying psychological entities that make it up (for much more, see Miller 2014: chapter one).
To conclude, I should note that I am an analytic philosopher working in moral psychology. Hence it is not surprising that my preference is for a more analytic rather than Continental approach to moral psychology (see Miller 2021). But in light of Huff and Furchert’s ecumenical and inclusive spirit, I am convinced that we should welcome a variety of perspectives and frameworks for better understanding moral psychology, and theirs is definitely a very welcome and valuable contribution. Indeed, there is no doubt that Huff and Furchert have written the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary treatment of moral psychology in decades. In their preface they report that the book was 14 years in the making, and we are in their debt for all of their hard work on this project.
REFERENCES
Batson, Daniel. (2011). Altruism in Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Christian. (2014). Character and Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
______________. (2021). Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reviewed by Christian B. Miller, Wake Forest University