Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2018) 21:433–434

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9867-9

Mark Alfano: Moral Psychology. An Introduction

Hanno Sauer 1

Accepted: 10 January 2018 / Published online: 27 January 2018

Empirically informed ethics is perhaps the most conspicuous trend in recent moral theory. It
doesn’t matter here whether followers of this trend are merely pretending, cherry-picking, or
actually drawing on empirical work. As a trend, it is real; it was only a matter of time, then, until
a demand for introductory texbooks would emerge. The first ones are now starting to trickle in.
Mark Alfano’s Moral psychology. An Introduction is one of them, and it is very good.
The book has five chapters. The first focuses on preferences and explains the frequently
surprising extent to which they are cognitively opaque, indeterminate, unstable, and readily
reversable. This has important implications for various moral theories such as many modern
forms of utilitarianism that place great weight on the notion of preferences and their satisfaction
or frustration. Chapter 2 concerns responsibility and how subpersonal processes such as implicit
biases can undermine conscious control over as well as people’s epistemic access to what drives
their motivations and actions. The third chapter reviews recent philosophical and empirical work
on the emotions, and links this research to the neuroscience of moral judgment, dual process
models of moral cognition and the selective debunking of moral judgments that are based on or
contaminated by the influence of disgust. Moral Character is the topic of chapter 4. Here, Alfano
somnambulistically (in the best way) summarizes the classic person/situation debate, discusses
the empirical studies everyone needs to know and discusses his own Bfactitious virtue^ account.
Evaluative disagreement and where to find it are the focus of the fifth chapter.
There is much to like about this book, and I highly recommend it. It is particularly suitable
as a textbook for courses on moral psychology (entry level or advanced), but even researchers
working in the field will find many interesting thoughts and stimulating insights.
A few things about this book stand out and deserve special emphasis. First, and perhaps
most importantly, the book does not merely introduce the reader to the main fields of research
in current moral psychology, but sketches a general theory of human agency and explains how
each of the five chapters’ topics relate to the core elements of this theory. Alfano argues that

* Hanno Sauer
h.c.sauer@uu.nl

1
University of Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
434 H. Sauer

moral agency is most plausibly understood along five dimensions: agency, patiency, sociality,
reflexivity and temporality. People can do things (agency) as well as suffer things happening to
them (patiency); they affect others with their actions (sociality) as well as themselves (reflex-
ivity), and their actions can have effects on their own or other people’s future selves
(temporality). These five dimensions lead to a model according to which moral agents are
constituents of recursively embedded and temporally extended structures of agent-patient
relations. How to think and feel about those structures, and to understand how they work, is
the subject matter of moral psychology. Different normative moral theories – such as
Kantianism or consequentialism – can be mapped in interesting ways on these five dimen-
sions; it seems clear that Kantianism highlights agency whereas utilitarianism speaks more on
behalf of moral patients. In a sense, then, the book occupies some kind of middle ground
between a textbook and a research monograph. It does not merely bring the reader up to speed
with regard to the received wisdom within its target subdiscipline, but also articulates an
original and opinionated perspective on it.
Second, the book contains a substantive and original discussion of moral disagreement, an
issue the importance of which, strangely enough, has been somewhat underappreciated in
recent moral psychology. (Other resources such as Valerie Tiberius’ Moral Psychology. A
Contemporary Introduction or John Doris’ Moral Psychology Handbook hardly discuss it at
all.) Alfano discusses the empirical case for the existence of fundamental moral disagreement
by drawing on various sources of empirical data, ranging from diachronic and synchronic
cross-cultural anthropology to lab studies; he concludes, plausibly to my mind, that only
disagreements of a certain depth and modal robustness qualify as test cases for or against moral
universalism/relativism; with this in mind, the pervasiveness of fundamental moral disagree-
ment is frequently exaggerated, though perhaps not entirely mythical.
Third, Alfano’s Moral Psychology offers a rich discussion of the Implicit Association Test
(IAT) which continues to attract a lot of attention for various regrettable reasons. Most recently,
its predictive prowess regarding explicit discriminatory behavior has been called into question.
Alfano’s book contains a nuanced discussion of just how much the results can actually show.
Fourth, what further enhances the book’s suitablity as teaching material is the fact that each
chapter concludes with a list of suggested readings and study questions. Almost everyone who
has ever taught a course in philosophy, ethics, or moral psychology will know how helpful
study questions can be as a way of scaffolding how students prepare for class, but how tricky
and time-consuming it can be to formulate them in an interesting, thought-provoking and non-
patronizing fashion. Thankfully, Alfano has done this work for us. An unusually thorough
glossary summarizing key technical terms rounds the whole thing off.
Of course, any reader will find that some of her favorite topics have been left out, or have been
touched upon too briefly. Sure, the various findings from experimental philosophy, the metaeth-
ical relevance of social and Jonathan Haidt’s political psychology, moral grammar theory, the
evolution of morality or freedom of the will all get a shout-out, but many of them could have
been dealt with in greater depth, at least to my taste. Then again, one can only do so much in the
space one is given. Perhaps this is something to contemplate in case of a second edition.
Finally, the chapter on the emotions features an extremely helpful typology of various
affective states such as disgust, contempt, fear, or surprise. To make it particularly vivid and
captivating, this typology is illustrated by photographs of two anonymous, but obviously first-
rate, actors who ably convey how different emotions have different somatic manifestations.
This is an impressive achievement.
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